Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Media Release:
For Immediate Release

October 1, 2011

Contact:
Karen Hadden, SEED Coalition 512-797-8481
Brett Jarmer and Robert V. Eye, Attorneys, 785-234-4040
Susan Dancer, South Texas Association for Responsible Energy, 979-479-0627

Austin, Texas Opponents of two proposed South Texas Project nuclear reactors received a favorable order from Atomic Safety and Licensing Board judges allowing a full hearing to proceed regarding the project’s foreign ownership. Licensing efforts may be impacted as a result. In April, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Unistar Nuclear Energy it could not get an operating license for its planned reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland because it was fully owned by France’s Électricité de France (EDF)-a foreign entity.

"Federal law is clear that foreign controlled corporations are not eligible to apply for a license to build and operate nuclear power plants. The evidence is that Toshiba is in control of the project and this precludes obtaining an NRC license for South Texas Project 3 & 4," said Brett Jarmer, a lawyer for the Intervenors; SEED Coalition, Public Citizen and South Texas Association for Responsible Energy.

"Foreign investment in U.S nuclear projects is not per se prohibited; but Toshiba is paying all the bills for the STP 3 & 4 project. This makes it difficult to accept that Toshiba doesn’t control the project," said attorney Robert Eye.

"National security and safety concerns justify NRC’s limits on foreign ownership and control of nuclear reactors," said Karen Hadden, Director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition. "What if a foreign company runs a U.S. reactor carelessly? What if a nation that’s friendly today becomes hostile toward the US in the future and tries threaten us with our own reactors?"

"Even if the reactors are operated by the South Texas Nuclear Operating Company, they will get their orders from foreign owners. What if their concerns are more about cost-cutting and less about safety?" asked Susan Dancer, President of South Texas Association for Responsible Energy. "Japanese investors would have us believe that they can come to America and safely build, own and operate nuclear plants, and that we should not concern ourselves with passé laws and regulations, but the Fukushima disaster has demonstrated the flawed Japanese model of nuclear safety. Our nuclear reactors should be controlled by the people most concerned about our country: fellow Americans."

September 30, 2011

Atomic Safety and Licensing Board order – allowing a full hearing on the foreign ownership of South Texas Project reactors

• Read Foreign Control Release and related ASLB Order

Saturday, Sept. 24, 2011

By Rob Pavey, Staff Writer
Agusta Chronicle

Those deliberations – which begin Tuesday – are the latest in a series of firsts for an expansion that could bring 3,500 construction jobs to Georgia.

Nuclear Regulatory Comm­ission Chairman Gregory Jaczko noted that the Vogtle application is the first to reach the final steps toward obtaining the first "combined operating license" that would allow both the construction and operation of new reactors.

"This mandatory hearing on the first COL application represents a critical step in the NRC’s license review process," he said.

The $14.8 billion Vogtle project, if licensed, would also have the first new commercial power reactors to be built in the U.S. in a generation – and would be the first project in the nation to utilize the new AP1000 modular reactor design created by Westingthouse.

"I look forward to working with my colleagues as we approach this significant assignment of delving into the adequacy of the NRC staff’s review of this application," Jaczko said of the hearing, which will include presentations from Southern Nuclear experts and NRC staff members.

Although testimony will be Tuesday and possibly Wednesday, the commission will not rule on the request this week, said Scott Burnell, an NRC headquarters spokesman.

"This is more information gathering and discussion," he said. "The authority to issue the license lies with the director of the NRC Office of New Reactors, and he would be able to make a final decision once the commission issues its findings."

Southern Nuclear has passed most major milestones in the licensing process – such as safety and environmental reviews – but cannot receive a combined operating license until the NRC formally agrees to certify the design of the AP1000 reactors.

Although the NRC has indicated it will recommend certification for the design, that final step has not yet occurred. "The staff expects to give the commission that proposed final rule in the near future, but we don’t have a specific date."

The AP1000 has been praised for its passive cooling system in which water stored above the reactor can flow into the unit by gravity, and without electricity or pumps. The first such units in the world are already under construction in China, where four new units are being added to existing nuclear plants.

If the certification rule is approved late this year, it could allow a decision on the Vogtle license early next year, Burnell said.

Southern Nuclear officials, meanwhile, are optimistic that all those issues could be resolved earlier.

"We still believe we will receive the COL around the end of the year," company spokesman Steve Higginbottom said. "We can see the finish line."

Some work is already under way at the Burke County site, as allowed under a federal Early Site Permit that enabled site preparation to begin before a formal license is granted. Those efforts will help the construction of Units 3 and 4 move along faster, with a current schedule that calls for bringing the new units online in 2016 and 2017.

One other first for the Vogtle project involves Southern Nuclear’s acquisition of the first-ever federal loan guarantee announced by the Obama Administration in February 2010.

The agreement, for which final terms remain under negotiation, will allow up to $8.33 billion in financing for the project. One of the conditions of receiving that financial commitment is the final approval for the combined operating license.

Although the NRC’s scrutiny this week of the Vogtle application is the first, another nearby project isn’t far behind.

SCANA Corp. is planning two new reactors at its V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant in South Carolina, and is scheduled to go before the NRC to discuss its final license request Oct. 11-12, Burnell said.

Last week, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the ratings of SCANA Corp., citing, among other reasons, "the heightened risk associated with a large nuclear construction program extending through 2019 that is expected to be about 50 percent debt financed and will pressure future financial metrics."

Higginbottom said there have been no downgrades of Southern Co. ratings related specifically to nuclear.

"We don’t believe the SCANA downgrade will have any impact on us," he said. "Moody’s downgrade of SCANA was primarily a result of the size of the project to the size of the company."

Southern Nuclear, owned by Southern Co., operates the plant for its co-owners, including Georgia Power Co., which owns 45.7 percent of Vogtle. The remaining ownership is split among Oglethorpe Power Corp., the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Dalton Utilities.

Photo: Eric Schultz/Associated Press
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s never-completed Bellefonte nuclear plant in Hollywood, Ala.

August 18, 2011

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

The directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority unanimously approved a plan on Thursday to finish the partly built Bellefonte 1 nuclear reactor, a project on which the authority spent billions of dollars in the 1970s and ’80s but dropped in 1988 because of cost overruns and declining estimates of power demand.

The revived reactor, in Hollywood, Ala., is not expected to be completed before 2018 to 2020 — or about a half-century after the project was first announced, and following nearly a quarter-century of limbo.

"The T.V.A, has wrestled with the fate of Bellefonte since 1988," said Marilyn A. Brown, a board member who is a professor of energy policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy. The decision comes at a time when other countries, Germany and Switzerland, for example, are leaning away from nuclear power and closing older plants, after the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex in Japan in March.

The long-anticipated "nuclear renaissance" in the United States appears to have stalled as well, with only four reactors currently being built, two in Georgia and two in South Carolina.

Read more at the New York Times website….

August 29, 2011

By Joe Conason
AlterNet

Most Americans have never heard of Harold Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low.

Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency-a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled "Fed Up!" Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a "dirty energy" state where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.

But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.

The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance-and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials-Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.

"We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that," Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. "Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied."

Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year, a local monthly in his hometown published the headline "Dallas’ Evil Genius" over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.

In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns-innocuously named Waste Control Systems-manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.

Now reporters for The Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.

In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.

This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry-who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state-voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state Legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to The Los Angeles Times’ report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an "independent" committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another "independent" political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)

According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into "an easy target. … It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough." But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the L.A. Times reporters, "This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site … . Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. … The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics."

As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too-to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.

Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.
© 2011 Creators.com