Archive for the ‘News’ Category

April 15, 2010

By JACK Z. SMITH
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

GRANBURY — Luminant, the power generator proposing a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, took issue Thursday with arguments that it failed to give sufficient consideration to renewable energy alternatives and catastrophic radiation leaks that might result from an event such as a terrorist attack.

The issues were debated by lawyers for Luminant and plant opponents at a hearing held in Granbury by a three-judge panel of the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The hearing is part of Luminant’s application for a license to expand Comanche Peak from two to four reactors. The plant is near Glen Rose, 45 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

The panel is expected to decide, perhaps within two months, whether Luminant’s environmental report on the proposed expansion gives adequate consideration to alternatives to nuclear power and to safety risks posed by building reactors near the existing ones, which went online in the early 1990s.

Luminant attorney Steven Frantz said renewable energy options, such as a combination of wind and solar energy supplemented by natural-gas-fired generation and a compressed-air energy storage system, wouldn’t meet the need for a "baseload" power plant that could reliably generate large volumes of electricity around the clock.

"There are no combined wind and solar facilities anywhere in the world that provide baseload power," Frantz said. "It’s never been done."

Robert Eye, an attorney for opponents of the nuclear expansion, argued that the technology for wind and solar power is "advancing on an almost daily basis."

Frantz said amendments to Luminant’s environmental report adequately address concerns about the ability of Comanche Peak to contain radiation leaks. But Eye countered that Luminant failed to sufficiently consider the possibility that substantial radiation could be emitted by spent nuclear fuel if there were an accident.

Plant opponents, dubbed "intervenors" in the licensing process, are the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition, Public Citizen, True Cost of Nukes and state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth.

Attorneys for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses new reactors, often sided with Luminant’s lawyers Thursday in the oral arguments on its amended environmental plan.

The war of words continued outside the Central Jury Room of the Hood County Justice Center, where the hearing was held by atomic licensing board administrative judges Ann Marshall Young, Gary Arnold and Alice Mignerey.

"Despite limitations on what was allowed to be presented about clean and safe energy alternatives to more reactors, we were able to make a strong case," Burnam said Thursday on behalf of plant opponents. "Hopefully, the panel of judges will listen," said Burnam, who called nuclear power "an outdated and dangerous way to generate electricity."

Eliza Brown, clean energy advocate for sustainable-energy coalition, said "all it takes is one serious accident such as a meltdown or terrorist attack on a spent fuel pool to result in catastrophe. … Deaths and cancers would result from radiation releases, as well as birth defects from genetic damage."

In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Comanche Peak Site Vice President Mitch Lucas countered that the plant "has seen 20 years of very safe operation."

"I’m completely confident in the safety of the existing units and the [proposed] new units," he said.

The plant’s concrete walls are four to four-and-a-half feet thick with "massive rebar [reinforcing steel]," Lucas said. He said the plant’s "robust design" could help it withstand a hit by a large plane, such as those used on 9-11.

Comanche Peak "was already a very, very secure facility, but we’ve increased security after 9-11," Lucas said.

The proposed new reactors would add 3,400 megawatts of generation capacity at Comanche Peak, more than doubling the current 2,300-megawatt capacity. Luminant has estimated the expansion cost at $15 billion, but former Texas utility regulatory official Clarence Johnson has pegged the cost at $23.8 billion to $27.6 billion.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

By RANDY LEE LOFTIS
The Dallas Morning News

GRANBURY – The prospect of expanding Comanche Peak, the two-reactor plant 75 miles southwest of Dallas that churns out nuclear power, is stirring arguments over the atom that date back to the first round of nuclear construction decades ago, plus some new ones barely imagined in the 1970s.

Federal regulators heard Thursday from Comanche Peak’s owner and operator, Luminant Generating Co., and from a group of opponents on some issues that have long dominated nuclear debate, such as the consequences and likelihood of a catastrophic radioactive accident.

Three Nuclear Regulatory Commission administrative law judges sifting through Luminant’s application to add two reactors to the two-reactor plant also listened as the company and its opponents argued over newer concerns, such as a potential terrorist strike on the plant with a hijacked airliner.

The judges are considering whether Luminant included enough information about environmental impacts in documents submitted with its NRC license application. Opponents say the review was inadequate, while the company calls it the most comprehensive such study in history.

Comanche Peak – which received its Unit 1 operating license 20 years ago Saturday — is among 18 sites nationwide where power companies have filed applications to build new reactors, the first to be proposed in about 30 years. Some recently announced reactors are on hold and might not be built for economic or other reasons, but Comanche Peak is moving forward.

Three sites are in Texas: Comanche Peak in Somervell County; the existing South Texas Plant in Matagorda County; and a new plant proposed in Victoria County. Amarillo is also a potential site.

Plans for new reactors are working their way through a streamlined but still complex licensing procedure at the NRC, which is run by a five-member commission. President Barack Obama has appointed one sitting commissioner and will fill two vacancies.

Obama is a nuclear power supporter, describing it as a clean and efficient source of electricity and part of a comprehensive energy strategy. His administration, with congressional approval, is providing billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for new plants, hoping to encourage investors to back the plans.

At the same time, the administration has stopped work on a permanent repository for highly radioactive, long-lived nuclear plant waste. Waste now sits in storage at each plant.

Finances for the new plants are in flux, but industry experts say they expect most new reactors to cost about $10 billion.

Each new plant undergoes engineering and environmental scrutiny. Comanche Peak’s environmental review, the topic of Thursday’s hearing in Granbury, is guiding the NRC as it determines whether Luminant’s plan complies with the National Environmental Policy Act.

That law requires consideration of impacts on public health and safety, water, air, land and wildlife.

The review also provides a one-stop source to members of the public who want to review the expansion plan’s environmental consequences for themselves.

Those factors make the review’s adequacy a major factor in the government’s decision on Luminant’s plan.

"The question is: Is the information that they have provided complete?" the NRC panel’s chairman, Ann Marshall Young, told about 30 people in the jury assembly room of the Hood County Justice Center.

Luminant attorney Steve Frantz told the NRC judges that the company had prepared the most detailed environmental review of a nuclear plant ever attempted, covering everything from land use to the consequences of simultaneous accidents at all four reactors.

"Nobody’s ever gone to this extent before," Frantz said.

Opponents, including some Texas environmental groups and state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, contended that Luminant’s environmental review omits crucial and required information.

The hole in the environmental review "may have been partially filled, but it has not been completely filled," said Robert Eye, the opponents’ attorney.

Eye said the review does not adequately address whether a severe accident at one unit might make it impossible for the other units to shut down quickly. Neither, he said, does it fully consider alternatives to nuclear power, including new technologies in wind and solar power and natural gas.

The federal environmental policy act requires consideration of alternatives to the proposed project.

In earlier proceedings, the NRC judges allowed those contentions to move forward, indicating that they raised valid issues. Luminant then revised its environmental report to address both issues.

Frantz told the judges that Luminant’s new submittals should automatically invalidate the opponents’ objections about the review’s adequacy. Some issues, such as making the plant safe from an airborne terrorist attack, are covered by NRC design and construction rules, but their possible consequences get little attention in the environmental review because they are considered "speculative and remote," he said.

"We have addressed a reasonable set of alternatives," he said. Unless some new issue arises, he said, "there is no reason to go further."

Eye, however, said it isn’t reasonable for Luminant to dismiss the potential of wind and solar power as substitutes for new reactors when wind power is growing rapidly in Texas and wind and solar technology is "advancing on almost a daily basis."

Alec Baldwin
Huffington Post
April 11, 2010

In two previous posts, I wrote about the path I had gotten on, back in 1995, to shut down a research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The reactor, called a High Flux Beam Reactor, or HFBR, had its operations suspended and was eventually shut down, in 1999, after an investigation established that tritium had leaked from spent fuel pools and had contaminated ground water within and beyond the Brookhaven Lab site.

I met many people while working on the BNL issue, as well as other battles involving nuclear power. One of them was Randy Snell, a Long Island resident who raised his family near Brookhaven. Snell’s daughter developed a rare form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, which was found in several other children living near BNL. The total number of cases was fifteen times the national average. Snell, and others who were struggling with “rhabdo” (and other soft tissue cancers) near reactors or enrichment facilities, told me that exposure to low-level radiation is a factor in the disease.

Many activists working on the issue at the time referred to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and its discussion of "bioaccumulation." Carson stated that chemical contamination, both alone and in conjunction with radiological contamination, would lead to extraordinary health hazards for human and animal populations. Long Island, particularly the Eastern region (Suffolk County) has been bombarded with applications of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides for many decades. Chemicals applied in farming (particularly potato farming), home lawn care, ball parks and golf courses have been driven down through a rather shallow “lense” of soil and have contaminated groundwater on Long Island with impunity. Breast cancer rates in Suffolk County are among the highest in the US.

After BNL was shut down, the group I was working with at the time, Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR) Foundation folded. Contacts I had made while with STAR led me to the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) and my association with Dr. Jay Gould, Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Joe Mangano, who is the current Executive Director of RPHP. While RPHP introduced me to debates regarding alternative energy and the dangers posed by utility reactors all over the US, RPHP’s focus was on Millstone in Connecticut, on Indian Point in Buchanan, New York and, most intently, on the Oyster Creek Reactor in Tom’s River, New Jersey.

RPHP’s assertion is clear and is not new information. There are no safe levels of exposure to the byproducts created by the generation of reactors currently in use. RPHP has dedicated much of their work to promulgating the research of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, whose seemingly innocuously titled research into strontium 90 deposits in children’s primary teeth actually helped influence John F. Kennedy’s test ban decision in 1963. The "Tooth Fairy Project" supports a simple idea. Strontium 90, emitted by conventional utility reactors, mimics calcium in the body and is termed "bone-seeking." It deposits itself in the bones and marrow, after the larger amount of food-ingested strontium 90 is excreted by the body. In the developing fetuses of pregnant women, strontium 90 (again, mimicking calcium) is deposited in the teeth. Once in the teeth, it decays into a "daughter element", yttrium, the element that researchers like Stenglass look for as the marker for elevated exposure to radiation.

Sternglass came to this research after he familiarized himself with the work of Dr. Alice Stewart, a British epidemiologist who had studied the effects of radiation on children from X-rays. Later in her career, Stewart worked on a study of the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state. Some of the original and most significant work in this field was done by Dr. Louise Z. Reiss, who oversaw the 1958 study, The St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey. The St. Louis survey found that traces of radioactive elements in new born children had risen 100 fold during the 1950’s, which coincided with the most active period of above ground testing of atomic weapons. When the testing either ceased or was curtailed, levels of radioactive material in the primary teeth of children were found to have fallen.

Levels of radiation, as detected in children’s teeth, fell after above ground testing ended. Then, according to Sternglass, they spiked again in direct relation to the growth of nuclear reactors as increased sources of power at public utilities.

In my next posts, I will address the work by Sternglass and others to apply strontium 90 research to the advent of utility reactors. Also, I will cover criticism of Sternglass’ work, discussion on this site of “new generation” thorium reactors, the travails of workers at enrichment plants like Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Piketon, Ohio, the political legacy of certain New Jersey officials (Democrat and Republican) as pertains to the Oyster Creek reactor, and the great, looming issue of nuclear waste management as symbolized by the heartbreaking tragedy of Hanford.

For Immediate Release
Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club
Thursday, April 29, 2010:

For More Information on the Poll:
Paul Maslin, FM3 Research
Phone Number: 608-204-5877

For More Information on Proposed Import of Radioactive Waste into Texas:
Cyrus Reed, Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club
Phone Number: 512-740-4086

(Austin) The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club released results of a survey today by pollster Paul Maslin showing that the strong majority of Texas voters oppose having a radioactive waste landfill in Texas.

The Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is currently considering a rule that would allow Waste Control Specialists to import radioactive waste from other states to their radioactive waste dump in Andrews County, Texas along the state’s border with New Mexico. The Commission is poised to consider the Waste
Importation Agreement rule at a public meeting on May 11th in Andrews, Texas.

Pollster Paul Maslin, who conducted the study, said that the results were emphatic:

"Texans clearly have an initial negative reaction to this landfill based on just a little information. As they hear more details, their opposition grows stronger and solidifies. When the potential to actually import waste from other states or countries is mentioned, opposition goes through the roof. This is a pretty vivid example of their desire that folks ‘don’t mess with Texas.’"

In a telephone survey* of 600 likely 2010 Texas general election voters, FM3 Research found a strong majority opposed to disposing of radioactive waste in the landfill that has been licensed in Andrews County in West Texas. The initial question was asked with no accompanying context or explanation of the issue or the details about
the landfill, except its location.

"Based on your understanding of the issues, does disposing of radioactive waste in a new landfill in Andrews County sound like something you would support or oppose?"

When voters were read a brief description of the landfill, including the fact that the site is "located in close proximity to the Ogallala Aquifer", opposition rose even further to 70%, with a majority (55%) now saying they strongly oppose the disposing of radioactive waste in this new landfill.

And when a subsequent question mentioned that the new landfill would "accept radioactive waste, not just from Texas, but from all over the country", opposition peaked at an extraordinary level of 80%, with now two-thirds strongly opposed to the disposal of radioactive waste in the West Texas landfill.

The survey was conducted from April 6-11 2010 among 600 respondents who are registered to vote and selected because they are likely to vote this November based on their past voting history and current vote intentions. The margin of error is +/ 4.0%.

The Lone Star Chapter, Sierra Club provided input into the development of the questions related to radioactive waste and the proposed import of radioactive waste into Texas.

"This poll shows conclusively that Texans do not want to import the nation’s radioactive waste to Texas," said Cyrus Reed, Conservation Director with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. "This survey shows that Sierra Club and other environmental organizations have the strong majority of Texas voters behind us when we say ‘No’, to the radioactive waste importation agreements."

"

# # #

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2010

CONTACT:
Andree Duggan, Media Director, 865.235.1448

Atlanta, Ga. – Today, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy won its lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court that aimed to protect Georgians from unfair utility costs in connection with the proposed construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia. The Court found that the Georgia Public Service Commission acted illegally in violation of Georgia state law. The Commission’s approval last year during the certification process for the proposed new Vogtle reactors is now in jeopardy.

"We applaud the Judge’s decision and continue to find it incredible that the Georgia Public Service Commission would put $14 billion of ratepayer money at risk on this project without properly documenting the factual basis behind this high risk decision," said Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "This ruling spotlights the ongoing incestuous relationship between the Commission and Georgia Power and highlights the regulatory breakdown and blatant lack of consumer protection."

At today’s hearing, Judge Wendy Shoob heard Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s (SACE) allegation that the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) erred as a matter of law by failing to make findings of fact and conclusions of law as required. Specifically, the group alleged that the PSC did not provide the required written justifications for its findings that would "afford an intelligent review" by the courts. The PSC instead relied on conclusory statements void of any reasoning. The Court ruled in favor of SACE and found that the PSC acted illegally in violation of Georgia state law by failing to make all appropriate findings and to support those findings with a concise and explicit statement of the facts.

"Among many other issues, the PSC needed to explain why they thought this was a prudent technology when this troubled reactor design, Westinghouse’s AP1000, has never even been built anywhere in the world before," commented Robert Smiles, co-counsel for SACE. "And the Court found that the PSC didn’t properly explain."

"Like the devastating oil disaster unfolding in the Gulf, decision makers that support questionable practices must be scrutinized in order for the public to be properly protected," said Michael Carvalho, co-counsel for SACE. "Fortunately, with the Court’s decision that happened today here in Georgia."

Today’s ruling also raises further concerns over the Obama Administration’s controversial decision in February to award an $8.3 billion taxpayer-financed conditional loan guarantee for Southern Company’s proposed Vogtle project, the first to be offered one in the country. The utility has 90 days to accept and recently requested a 30-day extension on making a decision.

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Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is a nonprofit organization that promotes responsible energy choices that create global warming solutions and ensure clean, safe, and healthy communities throughout the Southeast. For more information, go to: www.cleanenergy.org