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| | | published Friday, April 26, 2013 | 305 Views :: 0 Comments |
Legislation would establish new agency to find storage for high-level radioactive waste.
| | Gregory Bull | Associated Press file photo FILE - This Sept. 13, 2012 file photo shows the San Onofre nuclear power plant along the Pacific Ocean coastline in San Onofre, Calif. Two years after Japan's nuclear crisis, Alison Macfarlane, the top U.S. regulator, says American nuclear power plants are safer than ever, but not trouble-free. |
By Thomas Burr From the Salt Lake Tribune April 25, 2013
A bipartisan group of senators wants to form a federal agency responsible for finding homes for the nation’s scattered stockpile of nuclear waste — but only if the eventual storage sites would welcome the radioactive leftovers.
The draft legislation, unveiled Thursday, would implement plans from a blue-ribbon commission that sought to end a stalemate over what to do with tens of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste piling up around the nation at nuclear reactors since the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada was shelved.
The proposal would allow for temporary storage until a permanent facility is constructed. There are no plans at present to house either in Utah. A consortium of utilities backing a nuclear storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation has surrendered its license.
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| | | published Monday, July 02, 2012 | 1111 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 30, 2012
By Eric Connor From the Greenville News (SC)
In America’s capital, a new political realm has emerged in breaking the decades-old stalemate over solving the country’s nuclear waste dilemma — but it’s an impermanent territory that elected leaders in South Carolina, unified in their embrace of nuclear power, say they will not venture into.
Instead, they’ve placed their chips — all in — on a conviction that for 25 years has proved futile.
Sooner than later, they say, an abandoned, multibillion-dollar government project in a desert Nevada mountain must resurrect to become more than the political and geological wasteland that it is.
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| | | published Tuesday, June 26, 2012 | 1807 Views :: 1 Comments |
The following article about the national problem of spent nuclear fuel focuses on South Carolina's unique situation as a producer and storage location for spent fuel. Tom Clements, ANA's Nonproliferation Policy Director is quoted extensively discussing the possibility that South Carolina might become a national nuclear waste dump.
June 3, 2012
By Eric Connor From the Greenville News (SC)
Up the hill from the Oconee Nuclear Station’s imposing triple-reactor domes, in the shadow of the ornamental water tower encircled by symbolic atomic rings, a nondescript complex of graying concrete entombs lethal doses of nuclear waste whose radioactivity will outlive thousands of human generations.
The stockpile is so irradiated that hundreds of spent fuel rod assemblies housed inside must for nearly a decade rest deep beneath water pools near the reactors, where smoldering rods — deadly to the touch — are packed closer together than designers ever intended.
This is radioactive purgatory.
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| | | published Friday, September 23, 2011 | 1573 Views :: 1 Comments |
September 20, 2011
By Jessica Leigh Lebos
From Connect Savannah
With its federally–funded clean–up projects coming to a close this month, the Savannah River Site (SRS) will send the last of 3000 stimulus–backed jobs packing.
In an effort to consolidate waste and operations at the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) oldest weapons–grade plutonium plant, temporary workers contracted by the site’s managing entity, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), have spent the last two years sealing off old reactors, bringing down old buildings and shipping out contaminated waste accumulated during the Cold War.
“We’re kind of in celebration mode around here,” says Barbara Smoak, an SRNS spokesperson. “We were glad to be able to provide those jobs, even if some of them were temporary.”
Now that the clean–up is “complete” (while much radioactive debris has been removed from the property, only two of the site’s 49 tanks of high–level, radioactive liquid waste were filled with concrete) and $1.6 billion of taxpayer money has been spent, what’s next?
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| | | published Friday, September 09, 2011 | 1161 Views :: 0 Comments |
Sept. 9, 2011
The Western Governors' Association (WGA) has compiled a white paper on nuclear waste transportation and storage. This white paper will be presented at the Sept. 13th Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future meeting in Denver, Co.
Highlights from the WGA white paper include:
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| | | published Monday, August 01, 2011 | 897 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 30, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
The draft report making recommendations on the future of the nation's nuclear waste released Friday by the Blue Ribbon Commission was met with concerns and criticisms by those with Hanford interests.
They feared at best the draft report's recommendation could lead to high-level radioactive waste remaining at Hanford longer, and at worst that more waste could be shipped to Hanford or that Hanford's own waste would remain at the site indefinitely.
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| | | published Thursday, May 19, 2011 | 1382 Views :: 1 Comments |
May 18, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
PASCO — The states of Washington and Oregon teamed up Tuesday night to
tell the Department of Energy that bringing more radioactive waste to
Hanford would be a bad idea.
"It is inconceivable to us that U.S. DOE would spend billions of dollars
to try to clean up the environmental damage at Hanford, yet ignore that
work by proposing to dispose of additional highly radioactive wastes on
the site," said Ron Skinnarland of the Washington State Department of
Ecology, reading from a joint Washington and Oregon state letter to DOE.
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| | | published Monday, February 07, 2011 | 1499 Views :: 0 Comments |
February 05, 2011
By Bruce Krasnow From The Santa Fe New Mexican
The Carlsbad community in southeastern New
Mexico is admittedly attracted to nuclear waste. When it was virtually
the only community in the country willing to host the nation's first
nuclear waste repository almost 40 years ago, that interest may have
seemed a little desperate.
Now that the
federal government has canceled plans for its primary geological
repository at Yucca Mountain, and now that the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant is still the only operating geological repository in the world,
WIPP's supporters in Carlsbad are calling their decision a success story
and looking at opportunities for taking it to the next level.
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| | | published Wednesday, January 26, 2011 | 1336 Views :: 0 Comments |
January 26, 2011
Could N.M. Seek Nuke Waste?
By John Fleck
From the Albuquerque Journal
Our nation's struggle to find a way to dispose of its high-level
nuclear waste will descend on New Mexico this week in what could presage
a battle over bringing it here.
Boosters
from southeastern New Mexico hope to convince members of a federal
advisory panel that the region should be considered as a permanent
destination for the waste, left over from more than 50 years of U.S.
nuclear power generation. Critics say
any move in that direction would violate a deal made nearly two decades
ago when New Mexicans agreed to take modestly radioactive waste in
return for a federal commitment not to bring any of the high level stuff
here.
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| | | published Friday, February 12, 2010 | 3665 Views :: 2 Comments |
Op-Ed from Dan Yoken
On February 4, 2010, Secretary of Energy Chu testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to discuss the President’s FY2011 budget request. While we agree with many of Chu’s commitments to clean energy and environmental cleanup, the focus on nuclear energy projects, the imbalance of the Nuclear Waste Panel and the hefty commitment to MOX in the Nonproliferation budget present problems that could lead to debilitating results in coming years.
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