Archive for the ‘Nukes’ Category

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Dallas Morning News Editorial

Cracked asphalt provides a stark reminder of the nonexistent margin for error at a controversial radioactive waste dump in West Texas.

When state inspectors visited the site in Andrews County, they found cracks up to an inch wide in asphalt near canisters of radioactive material. While cracked asphalt is fairly inconsequential – and pretty much par for the course – when it comes to our city streets, it can be a dangerous proposition at a radioactive waste dump.

A spokesman for Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, which operates the low-level radioactive waste site, dismissed the cracks as superficial and said they have been repaired. But as the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has noted, that asphalt pad is an important safeguard against ground contamination.

The TCEQ is rightly seeking more information about the condition and history of the 10-acre asphalt pad. And that’s not the only cause for concern at the site. The TCEQ also plans to issue a notice of violation for storing a concrete canister filled with the hottest low-level radioactive material longer than allowed.

The Andrews County site has received six violation notices during the last six years, as significant questions about its proximity to an aquifer have swirled. The latest problems emerged amid a disconcerting push to significantly expand operations in Andrews County, potentially allowing 36 states to ship low-level waste to Texas.

Fortunately, members of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission have tapped the brakes and are revamping the plan, which had appeared to be on the fast track for approval. It’s not clear, though, how soon the compact commission might act.

The cracked asphalt and the questionable canister point to crucial safety questions that must be answered before any expansion gets consideration. The rules that could open up the current Texas-Vermont disposal agreement and permit dozens of states to dump waste in Andrews County don’t merely need to be tweaked; they should be tabled until officials are sure that every precaution has been taken to protect Texas and its residents.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

The argument for extreme caution in Andrews County should not be mistaken for a not-in-my-back-yard reflex or a broader opposition to nuclear energy. It’s simply recognition of the high stakes associated with radioactive waste disposal.

Last month, 15 Texas legislators wrote to the compact commission, urging members not to adopt the rules allowing expansion at the site right now. They underscored significant liability issues, concerns about health and safety, as well as the potential fiscal impact a leak could have.

As the lawmakers note, key questions about preparedness, precautions and due diligence have not yet been answered. At least for now, Texas is not sufficiently equipped to become much of the nation’s radioactive dumping ground.

June 29, 2010

By ANNA M. TINSLEY
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

A plan to potentially let 36 states ship radioactive waste to West Texas — loads that likely would pass through North Texas on major highways and railroads — is being revamped by state officials.

This month, members of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission took down proposed rules that could have allowed dozens of states to send low-level waste to a site in Andrews County. Environmentalists and state lawmakers were among those expressing concerns about leakage, contamination and the safety of communities along shipping routes.

"The rules were withdrawn," said Margaret Henderson, interim executive director of the commission. "There had been a number of public comments. [Commissioners] will be going through them and considering" what to include in a new version of proposed rules, she said.

As commissioners consider new rules, the disposal site — run by Waste Control Specialists and owned by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a major Republican donor — faces a violation notice for storing a concrete canister filled with low-level radioactive material for longer than allowed.

The commission is working to determine how the company should deal with the violation. It is also setting new rules on what materials are accepted at the West Texas site and whether other states can apply to send their low-level radioactive waste there.

No date has been set for the commission’s next meeting, and no timetable set for when the reworked rules will be released to the public, Henderson said.

Waste disposal

The Andrews County site is on top of layers of red bed clay in a sparsely populated area north of Odessa. It has had a hazardous-waste disposal permit since 1997.

State environmental officials have already agreed to let the site accept low-level waste from Texas — including from two nuclear plants, Comanche Peak near Glen Rose and the South Texas project in Matagorda County — as well as from Vermont and federal sources.

Now the question is how many other states can apply to send their waste there. The commission has twice delayed voting on a proposal that could open the site to at least 36 other states.

After new rules are written, they must be republished in the Texas Register for at least 30 days, and the public must have at least 30 days to comment before a vote occurs.

State Rep. Lon Burnam, who has expressed concerns about contamination in the North Texas communities the waste would pass through, is skeptical about what happens next.

"I think it’s natural for the activists who had a lot of concerns to feel like we have had a temporary reprieve, but that’s a too-narrow focus," said Burnam, D-Fort Worth. "They got bombarded with critical commentary that they are supposed to process and take into consideration.

"It’s clearly our responsibility to manage our waste and our sister’s waste from Vermont. It is not our responsibility to become the nation’s nuclear waste dump."

Burnam said he thinks politics will delay the new rules for several months.

"I don’t think anyone is going to know what the new rules include until after the [November] election," he said.

Shipments would include items such as beakers, soil, gloves, test tubes and hospital equipment that have come in contact with radioactive material. They would be shipped on trucks or trains, many passing through the Metroplex on a regular basis.

Violation notice

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality officials have said the site will receive a violation notice for storing the canister of radioactive material for more than a year, as allowed under a license granted to Waste Control Specialists.

State inspectors recently found cracks on an asphalt pad near where the canisters sit. Waste Control Specialists officials say the cracks were repaired last month and were "superficial." But inspectors want the company to turn over information about the status of the pad’s condition and how it was built.

Meanwhile, preparation continues at the site to break ground on the disposal facility. Officials have said it will take nearly a year to prepare the collection area.

Its size will depend on licensing requirements, financing and what rule the commission passes, company spokesman Rickey Dailey said. Company officials have said they didn’t mind the commission’s delay.

This report includes material from The Associated Press.

ANNA M. TINSLEY, 817-390-7610

June 28, 2010

By Kate Galbraith
Texas Tribune

Seventeen years ago, Texas turned on its last nuclear reactor, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth. In another decade, several more reactors could get built here — if events in Washington go the power companies’ way.

Nuclear power now accounts for 14 percent of Texas’s electricity usage (below the national average, 20 percent). The case for adding more reactors rests on a rising appetite for electricity sparked by a growing population and ever-proliferating gadgetry. And proponents point out that nuclear power, unlike coal or natural gas, is virtually free of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with global warming during its operations, although environmentalists strongly dispute the merits of the plants.

The federal government is moving ahead with a program that provides loan guarantees for the plants — a crucial step to placate financiers nervous about the economic risk of building them. Earlier this month, the Department of Energy agreed to a $3.4 billion guarantee for the expansion of a nuclear facility in Georgia, and the Obama administration recently asked Congress for more funds to help out more plants. Two proposed nuclear projects in Texas are high on the list of potential recipients.

"We’re very serious about moving ahead," says Jeff Simmons, who is leading the development efforts to add two new reactors to the Comanche Peak plant in Glen Rose, near Fort Worth. The project is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Luminant, a big Texas power generator, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The companies are hoping to get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of 2012 — a crucial green light for the plant.

"Before we even get the license, we will be hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of this project," Simmons says.

A second project is proposed for Bay City. Already, that site, called the South Texas Project, has two reactors, which began operating in the late 1980s. NRG Energy and CPS Energy, the San Antonio utility, have applied for a license to add two more reactors as well, although CPS recently whittled down its share of the project in a legal settlement as cost estimates ballooned.

Many hurdles remain before either project can be built, however. No new nuclear plants in the United States have been started in several decades (the Bay City and Glen Rose projects are the only ones in Texas and are among the last plants nationally to be built). Fears of another Three-Mile Island-type accident have hung over the industry, and the economics are daunting. Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build — each new reactor can cost $6 billion to $8 billion, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. As a result, many plant operators have convinced the government to extend the life of old plants rather than build new ones. (The four existing Texas reactors are new enough so that an extension is not an issue yet.)

Cost concerns have been compounded by the recent economic turmoil. With the credit markets still tight, financing a huge project is difficult. Also, the recession has depressed demand for electricity — which makes it less necessary to build more power plants in the near term. Texas’s electric usage last year was 1.3 percent less than forecast, and a new report from ERCOT, the state grid operator, projects that peak electricity use will grow by 1.72 percent annually between 2010 and 2019, compared with last year’s projection of 2 percent growth during those years. Also, low natural gas prices have pulled down the overall price of electricity, making it harder to justify building an expensive plant.

Economic uncertainties propelled one major nuclear plant operator, Exelon, to pull back on its plans. Last year Exelon changed its license application for a new plant in Victoria County to a less arduous application, for an "early site permit," which covers environmental and safety portions of the applications only.

"Right now we don’t plan to build a plant there. We do want to preserve the option to build there in the future," says Craig Nesbit, the vice president for communications at Exelon Generation.

Companies exploring a fourth possible Texas plant, in the Panhandle, have not yet applied for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, despite statements in 2008 that an application was planned for 2009.

The federal government holds the key to the economics, through loan guarantees. These essentially mean that the government will pick up the tab if the borrower — the plant owner — defaults. Earlier this month Southern Company agreed to a $3.4 billion loan guarantee for a reactor project in Georgia, part of a $8.3 billion loan-guarantee package for the plant announced in February. The total federal pot currently stands at $18.5 billion — enough for one more project but perhaps not more. (There is also a far smaller amount allocated to loan guarantees for renewable energy projects, which are considered risky and in need of federal guarantees because of their newness.)

As a result, there is jostling for a place in the loan-guarantee queue. The South Texas Project is third in line, after the Georgia project and a plant proposed by Constellation Energy. The Comanche Peak project is fifth in line. The Obama administration asked Congress in May to add $9 billion to the $18.5 billion program, which would mean enough for a few more projects after the Georgia one.

Environmentalists think nuclear power is a terrible idea.

"We think expanding the Texas nuclear fleet is a huge mistake because of cost and waste issues primarily — and that there are significantly cheaper alternatives that could provide the power at a fraction of the cost," says Tom "Smitty" Smith, the Texas director of the environmental and consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Energy-efficiency and renewable energy — such as the wind power that has grown quickly in Texas — would be far more cost-effective, he says.

Smith also maintains that nuclear plants’ "zero-emissions" arguments on greenhouse gases (although potentially crucial in the forthcoming debate about national energy legislation) are a red herring. "There are enormous emissions of greenhouse gases during the mining and enrichment, construction, decommissioning and then the storage for 50,000 years of this waste," he says. (At both existing Texas plants, the waste is stored on-site.)

But in Somervell County, home to the Comanche Peak reactors, there is community support for building more. The county has used homeland security grants to buy a military-style armored truck — to defend itself and its plant if needed.

"We’ve got to have more nuclear power," says County Judge Walter Maynard. "From a selfish standpoint, it’s very viable to our local economy."

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.