After getting $millions in investment, Transatomic molten salt nuclear reactor project bites the dust
A nuclear startup will fold after failing to deliver reactors that run on spent fuel, MIT Technology Review, James Temple, 25 Sept 18 Transatomic Power, an MIT spinout that drew wide attention and millions in funding, is shutting down almost two years after the firm backtracked on bold claims for its design of a molten-salt reactor.
High hopes: The company, founded in 2011, plans to announce later today that it’s winding down.
Transatomic had claimed its technology could generate electricity 75 times more efficiently than conventional light-water reactors, and run on their spent nuclear fuel. But in a white paper published in late 2016, it backed off the latter claim entirely and revised the 75 times figure to “more than twice,” a development first reported by MIT Technology Review…….
The longer timeline and reduced performance advantage made it harder to raise the necessary additional funding, which was around $15 million. “We weren’t able to scale up the company rapidly enough to build a reactor in a reasonable time frame,” Dewan says.
Transatomic had raised more than $4 million from Founders Fund, Acadia Woods Partners, and others. ……https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612193/nuclear-startup-to-fold-after-failing-to-deliver-reactor-that-ran-on-spent-fuel/
The dishonesty in the bribing of “willing host communities” for nuclear wastes
A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/ Montreal, August 25, 2018, Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 2018. “…….. The elusive “willing host community”DR: I know too there have been a lot of targeted “willing host communities” that have rejected it. Do you think they’ll succeed in finding one?
GE: Here in Canada they have gone through this process of looking for a “willing host community,” which is kind of foolish because these communities are very small. For example, I just visited two of them within the last few weeks way up above Lake Superior. In the two communities that I visited, Hornepayne and Manitouwadge, I gave presentations. These communities have less than a thousand residents in each one of them and they get $300,000 a year as basically bribe money in order to keep them on the hook, to keep them interested in learning more. It’s called the “learn more” program, and as long as they’re “learning more,” they can get $300,000 a year. Well, they are both interested in getting the money, and consequently they’re still in the running, but do they really want to be a nuclear-waste community? If this is such a good deal for them, then why aren’t other communities bidding for this—larger communities? Of course, one of the points that comes to mind immediately is that if you had a city of a million people or so, then you’d have to shell out $300 million instead of $300,000 every year, so this idea of a “willing host community” exists only because of the bribes that are given by the industry in order to keep these communities supposedly interested in receiving the waste. And in some of them, of course, there are people who see dollar signs and who see an opportunity for them to make a lot of money. In a small community, a certain small number of people can make a lot of money by capitalizing on an opportunity like that without being concerned very much about the long-term wisdom of it.
DR: Yeah, and the seventh future generation doesn’t get a voice.
I did speak to two other communities a couple of years ago in that same general area north of Lake Superior. One of them was the town of Schreiber, and one of them was White River, and both of those communities are now off the list. They’re no longer candidates, so we now have only three communities up north of Lake Superior which are still actively pursuing this program of taking money and “learning more.” I have spoken now to two of them and I haven’t yet been invited to go to the third one.
10. The great unknowable: long term care for nuclear waste. Who pays? Who cares?When I go there I try and point out to them not only the fact that this whole exercise is questionable, but also the fact that once the nuclear waste is moved up to a small remote area like this, what guarantee is there that it’s really going to be looked after properly? Because these small communities do not have a powerful voice.
They don’t have economic clout, and so they can’t really control this. If a person like Donald Trump, for example in the United States, or Doug Ford in Ontario, who many people think is a kind of a mini Donald Trump, thinks, “Why are we going to spend money on that? Forget it we’re not going to spend money on that,” then it’s going to not be pursued as originally planned. And it could become just a surface parking lot for high-level nuclear waste. Who is going to guarantee that it is actually going to be carried out? Now the nuclear plants are in danger of closing down. We’re having fewer nuclear plants every year than we had the year before now in North America, and consequently there’s not the revenue generation that there used to be. The money that’s been set aside is nowhere near adequate to carry out the grandiose project they’re talking about, which here in Canada is estimated to cost at least twenty-two billion dollars. They have maybe five or six billion, but that’s not nearly enough.
So there’s also another problem lurking in the wings, and that is that if you do want to carry out this actual full-scale program of geological excavation with all the care that was originally planned, how do you generate revenue? What company is willing to spend twenty-two billion dollars on a project which generates absolutely no revenue?
There are only two ways you can generate revenue from that, and one way is to take waste of other countries and charge a fee for storing the waste. The other thing is to sell the plutonium. If you extract the plutonium, then you could have a marketable product, but both of these ideas are extremely far from what these communities are being told. In other words, the plan that’s being presented to them does not include either one of these possibilities, and it changes the game considerably. As we all know, getting the plutonium out of the spent fuel involves huge volumes of liquid radioactive waste. It involves very great emissions, atmospheric emissions, and liquid emissions. The most radioactively polluted sites on the face of the earth are the places where they’ve done extensive reprocessing, such as Hanford in Washington, Sellafield in northern England, La Hague in France, Mayak in Russia, and so on.
DR: And Rokkasho in Japan.
GE: That’s right, and so this is a completely different picture than what they’re being presented with. Now whether or not that would actually happen is anybody’s guess, but it’s written right in their documents that this is an option, and they’ve never excluded that option. They’ve always included the option. In fact, the first sentence of the environmental impact statement written by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited many years ago says that when we say high-level nuclear waste we mean either irradiated nuclear fuel or solidified post-reprocessing waste. They have always kept that door open for reprocessing.
11. A disturbed “undisturbed” geological formation is no longer undisturbed But even under the best of circumstances we know that you can’t get waste into an undisturbed geological formation without disturbing it. As soon as you disturb it, it’s no longer the same ballgame. The other thing that people are unaware of, generally, is the nature of this waste. They really don’t realize that this waste is not inert material, that it’s active. It’s chemically active. It’s thermally active. It generates heat for fifty thousand years. They have a fifty thousand-year time period they call the thermal pulse, and the degree of radio-toxicity staggers the mind. Most people have no ability to wrap their mind around that. Take a simple example like Polonium 210 which was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko, and which will breed into the irradiated fuel as time goes on… According to the Los Alamos nuclear laboratories (it’s on their website), this material is 250 billion times more toxic than cyanide. That’s a staggering concept. In fact, nobody can wrap their mind around that, really. 250 billion times more toxic?! Theoretically that means that if you had a lethal dose of cyanide, and you had the same amount of Polonium 210, the cyanide could kill one person. The Polonium 210 could kill 250 billion persons. That’s amazing. How do you possibly wrap your mind around that?………https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-b
Trump-Kim nuclear summit planned – but there is no real progress towards nuclear agreement
While critics have warned against holding another meeting when North Korea has taken no meaningful steps toward dismantling its nuclear arsenal, Trump had nothing but praise for Kim, and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeodefended the potential sit-down as something of “enormous value” but only “if we can continue to make progress and have conversations.”
Trump said that the meeting would happen “in the not too distant future,” not in Singapore but a “location to be determined.” He added that Kim had shown “tremendous enthusiasm … toward making a deal” and praised their relationship as “very good. In fact, in some ways it’s extraordinary.”
“We are in no rush. There’s no hurry. … We’ve made more progress than anybody’s made ever, frankly, with regard to North Korea,” he added.
But that kind of talk has negatively impacted the push to have North Korea denuclearize, according to diplomats and experts. By praising Kim and saying there is no rush while North Korea has taken no concrete steps to dismantle its nuclear-weapons program, he takes the pressure off North Korea……..
talks have been stuck in a deadlock over the sequencing, with the U.S. insistent that it will make no more concessions until North Korea denuclearizes — although it’s unclear how far along that process it will have to be before the U.S. responds. North Korea wants some actions, like signing a declaration to formally end the Korean War, first. ………https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-preparing-2nd-summit-kim-nuclear-progress/story?id=58049260
USA must declare an end to the Korean war – to bring peace to the peninsula
To a packed audience of 150,000 North Koreans wildly cheering on their feet on September 20 at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, President Moon affirmed, “We have lived together for 5,000 years and been separated for 70 years. We must live together as one people.”
At their summit, Kim and Moon announced a long list of actionable stepsthey will take to improve relations, from establishing a reunion center for divided families to reopening the Mt. Kumgang tourism center and the Kaesong industrial zone — two inter-Korean development projects from the previous Sunshine Policy years that were shut down as relations worsened between the two Koreas during the previous two hardline administrations. The defense ministers also agreed in a separate military agreement to reduce military tensions by downsizing the number of guards near the Military Demarcation Line, the border dividing North and South Korea in the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) established by the Armistice Agreement in 1953. The Korean leaders also agreed to de-mine a village in the DMZ surrounding the border between North Korea and South Korea.
As part of the Pyongyang Declaration by the two Koreas to transform the Korean Peninsula “into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats,” Kim committed to “permanently dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile engine test site” in the presence of international inspectors, and “the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon.” But this would depend on “corresponding measures” by the United States “in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.”
Trump last month canceled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, saying North Korea had not made “sufficient progress” toward denuclearization. North Korean leaders, however, say the United States hasn’t honored its end of the Singapore Declaration in which the first two items were to improve relations and establish a peace process. Denuclearization came third, and the repatriation of the remains of US service members was a last added item.
Pyongyang has already made several concessions: It has halted missile and nuclear tests, begun to dismantle the Sohae missile launch site and destroyed the Punggye-ri nuclear test in the presence of foreign journalists, released three detained Americans, and repatriated the remains of US service members from the Korean War. The United States, meanwhile, has halted one joint military exercise after Trump’s spontaneous announcement at the press briefing following his meeting with Kim. But these joint exercises could easily be resumed.
North Korea has made clear that denuclearization will require a peace process that includes concrete steps toward a Peace Treaty, as promised in the 1953 Armistice Agreement signed by the United States, North Korea and China. James Laney, a former US ambassador to South Korea under Clinton, has argued, “A peace treaty would provide a baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s legitimacy and its right to exist. Absent such a peace treaty, every dispute presents afresh the question of the other side’s legitimacy.”
But North Korea is unlikely to unilaterally surrender its nuclear weapons without improved relations. We knew that the Clinton and Bush administrations were close to waging a pre-emptive strike on Pyongyang, but now Bob Woodward’s book Fear has also confirmed that even President Obama weighed a first strike on North Korea. Kim has seen what happened to Iraq, Libya and Iran, not to mention his own country’s experience of a devastating US bombing.
Most Americans have no idea that in just three years, the Korean War claimed over 4 million lives. The US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, more than it did in the rest of the Asia-Pacific in WWII combined, and it used 33,000 tons of napalm in Korea — more than in Vietnam. Curtis LeMay, a US Air Force general in the Korean War, testified, “We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea … we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.” The US’s indiscriminate bombing campaign leveled 80 percent of North Korean cities, killing one out of every four family members. The bombing of homes was so devastating that the regime urged its citizens to build shelter underground.
On July 27, 1953, the Korean War ended in a stalemate with a ceasefire. Military commanders from the US, North Korea and China signed the Armistice Agreement and promised within 90 days to return to negotiate a peace settlement. Sixty-five years later, we are still waiting for that Peace Treaty to end the Korean War.
A peace treaty would end the state of war between the United States and North Korea, taking the threat of a military conflict off the table. A ceasefire — a temporary truce — is what has defined the US-North Korean relationship.
One tangible step that the Trump administration can take that the North Koreans would view as a “corresponding measure” is to declare an end to the Korean War……….https://truthout.org/articles/to-secure-peace-between-the-koreas-us-must-declare-an-end-to-the-war/
The next big thing: unfeasible small modular nuclear reactors
A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/ Montreal, August 25, 2018, Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 18, “…….. 8. The next big thing: unfeasible small modular reactors
They want to basically clear the decks by shoving this waste off to the side so that they can use this territory, which is crown land owned by the Government of Canada, in order to develop a whole new generation of small modular reactors which are also pie-in-the-sky. They don’t have any customers at the present time. They say there’s a great deal of interest in small modular reactors. However, the interest is almost totally confined to the nuclear establishment. It’s the nuclear people who are interested in these small modular reactors, nobody else.
In fact, we’ve had bad experience with small modular reactors Canada. We had two ten-megawatt nuclear reactors designed and built. They were built around the year 2000, and each one of these reactors was supposed to be able to replace the very old NRU reactor at Chalk River, which is the largest isotope production reactor in the world. And each one of these reactors—they’re called maples, the maple reactors—each one of them would be able to take over the workload of the already-existing NRU reactor which is now shut down. They couldn’t get either one of them to work properly. They were so unsafe, and so unstable in their operation that without operating them and after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars in building them, they now are dismantling them without ever having produced any useful results.
They also had here in Canada a design called a “slowpoke district heating reactor,” and this reactor was ranging from ten megawatts to a hundred megawatts, thermal power only, no electricity, and the idea of this was it could be a reactor which could supply district heating for buildings and so on. That was also a complete failure. That was back in the last century in the 80s and 90s in Canada. They tried to give these things away for free, and they couldn’t even give them away for free. Nobody wanted them.
So the whole business of nuclear waste has really been obfuscated by the industry who are perpetually trying to convince people that they have the solution, that they know what to do, and that when they do it, it’ll be perfectly safe. All of our experience points in the opposite direction…………https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-back-at-the-achievements-of-the-canadian-coalition-for-nuclear-responsibility-ccnr-http-
What to expect from media and politicians when we want action on nuclear wastes
A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/Montreal, August 25, 2018, Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 2018 “………… What to expect from media and politicians
I think you appear sometimes on CBC and they give you five minutes or ten minutes, so has any of that sort of transformed into journalists picking up the issue and working with it more seriously, or politicians bringing up the issue in parliament?
We live in a very scattered society right now with what’s going on with President Trump in the United States, and what’s going on with the media. The concentration of ownership of the media, the elimination of a lot of independent journalism, like neighborhood newspapers and that sort of thing, community newspapers. Even within the mainstream media there is the idea that journalists are now being shunted into media conglomerates where the reporting is expected to go simultaneously into numerous papers, and so this makes it more and more difficult for these kinds of things to be done. However, as I point out to my friends, we’ve had many, many examples like, for instance, apartheid South Africa, or the Soviet Union before its demise, where there was no free press, and yet people got things done. The thing is that I don’t think the absence of a vital press should be a serious obstacle. I think we have to use whatever tools we have available to us, and we in North America have all kinds of freedom to express ourselves, and so we have to use what tools are available to us. For example, we’ve had many victories.
19. VictoriesI could tell you a few stories because without knowing specific examples, it all sounds very airy-fairy. It all sounds very theoretical, but, for example, we have Bruce Power, which is a private company that rents publicly owned nuclear reactors in Ontario, eight of them, and operates them for profit. They wanted to ship sixteen contaminated steam generators through the Great Lakes and through the Saint Lawrence Seaway and across the ocean to Sweden for their convenience basically. It was for their convenience so that they could have these things dismantled in Sweden. And also some of the radioactive left leftovers would be in fact secretly blended, and I say secretly. They would not reveal the names of the companies involved. Those are secret because those companies would not want the public to know what they’re engaged in. And that was actually recorded in public hearings. They wanted to secretly blend some of this less radioactive metal with non-contaminated metal. So they wanted to deliberately contaminate scrap metal. They wanted to deliberately contaminate the scrap metal market without any knowledge or notification that this scrap metal contained post-fission radioactive waste. And of course more and more of this is going to be happening as time goes on.
So we managed to stop that, and we managed to stop that through very word-of-mouth methods. We managed to get hundreds of communities passing resolutions against it on both sides of the border, both in the United States and Canada. We got lawmakers in the United States sending letters objecting, and the press was never playing a leadership role in this, but as the story became more interesting they would report on it just because it’s a good news story.
But to expect the press to play any leadership role is dreaming in technicolor, I think, especially in today’s world. We have to create such a social movement that the press cannot ignore it, and then the press starts reporting. And the same thing goes with the government. In certain respects you could say that our government leaders are not leaders. They’re followers, and the largest voices, the loudest voices are usually the voices of industry, and so they follow what they’re being told by industry or by other countries, big players like the United States, for example, but occasionally the public voice becomes loud enough that it drowns out the industrial voice or at least rivals it. In those cases a government can finally act, in their own self-interest, but not totally in their own self-interest. I hope that there’s a glimmer of concern, genuine concern about the future and the environment and doing the right thing.
But you’ve got to have a combination. It’s often said, for example, in lawsuits that behind the technical judgment where a judge might make some technical decision which lets somebody off the hook or which convicts somebody of some crime, there’s often a non-technical reason behind. Certain evidence has been heard and certain issues have been raised which, if a judge is touched by those issues, and feels that this is a case which deserves very careful consideration, then without breaking the law or even bending the law, the judge can find some legal aspect which will allow her or him to do the right thing. That’s not the judge’s main prerogative. His or her main prerogative is to ensure that the law is obeyed, and that can be done, but there has to be some kind of a conscience involved there, too, and I think there often is.
I think it’s the same thing with government. As I’ve said to people here, even if you yourself were the Minister of Energy all of a sudden, you couldn’t just do what you wanted. You have to have the support of your colleagues in cabinet. You have to have the support of people who have contributed to the party, and so on. These are all considerations, but if you have a vocal public who are clamoring to have something done, and it’s something you agree should be done, it strengthens your hand as a political person to be able to enact a law or to be able to take some political step which can be justified to colleagues. I don’t know if I’m making much sense here, but we’ve had some very good examples of this, not only with the steam generators.
20. Cross-border activism for environmental protectionI’ll give you one other example. In Vermont, the US Department of Energy were hunting for a repository in crystalline rock for high-level radioactive waste. This is back in the 90s. We had a busload of people here from Quebec who went down to Vermont and participated in public meetings and so on, and the Vermonters were delighted to see us there. And we raised some very pointed questions which the industry found difficult to answer. For example, the first question I asked at a public meeting was, “If this project is so safe, why is low population density one of your criteria?” And the man from the Department of Energy said that’s a good question, and he went red in the face, and he couldn’t give an answer.
So this thing blew up until the point where we had many public meetings in Vermont and we, as Quebecers, were invited to attend, and the US Department of Energy said, “Look, we have no choice. We have to obey the law, and the law has been written by the US Congress, the highest law of the land, and they passed a law saying that there will be a repository in crystalline rock in the Northeast United States, so don’t blame us. We can’t just snap our fingers and say we’re not going to do this.” But the voices of the people were so strong, and what really happened here was that it became an international incident because a lot of the people who were interacting within this debate were from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Sherbrooke in particular, and the Member of Parliament from Sherbrooke was Jean Charest, who subsequently became the premier of Quebec. He was at that time a federal member of parliament. He went to his bosses in his own party, and who were the ruling party at that time, and they had a diplomatic note delivered to the Americans through the Canadian ambassador in Washington, saying that Canada would not look kindly on a nuclear waste repository right on our border where the water flows into Canada from the United States.
So to make a long story short, what happened was the impossible was done. The law was rewritten, and there was no repository in Vermont. Now you might say, “Well, that’s just postponing the problem or pushing it off.” True. But it’s a victory for us, and it shows that people, when they get themselves mobilized, can really have an effect on events, and we’ve had many successes of that sort, here in Quebec, in particular, and we hope to have many more. But the purpose is not to pursue a NIMBY idea (not in my backyard). The purpose is to call attention to the fact that this whole exercise is really an exercise based on dishonesty. It’s based on the dishonest claim that they in fact know what they’re doing, and that they in fact know that this will be a solution. It is really the survival strategy for the nuclear industry rather than a strategy that will ensure the safety of future generations. So we don’t feel that we’re acting in bad faith. We feel that we’re acting in good faith, and we’re doing our best to enlighten people as to the nature of this bad deal, and the nature of the fact that the wrong people are in charge of the program.
21. High, medium or low-level waste: similar ingredients in all of themGE: We have concentrated a lot here on the high-level waste, but in fact this consortium is not dealing with high-level waste. They’re dealing with low-level waste, medium-level waste. I hate these words because, of course, it’s the same material in many cases. They are exactly the same isotopes that you find in the high-level waste in many cases. They’re just at lower concentrations, so it’s bad language from the nuclear industry that is again fundamentally dishonest. But it’s really the decommissioning and the storage of all those other post-fission wastes that most people have never even given a thought to because they’ve been misled into thinking they don’t exist…….. https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-back-at-the-achievements-of-the-canadian-coalition-for-nuclear-responsibility-ccnr-http-ww/
Magical thinking about nuclear waste – but that doesn’t solve the problem
3. Early days: ignorance about nuclear wasteBut if we just back off on all this, the way my organization sees the picture, my organization being the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, which formed in the early 1970s—Well, basically in 1974 we formed, and from our view, the first thirty years of the nuclear age were characterized by a total ignorance about nuclear waste. That is, the public was not informed that there was such a thing as nuclear waste and the decision-makers who authorized the spending of billions of dollars in building a nuclear infrastructure and nuclear reactors were also not informed that this was a major unsolved problem. So it was basically a lie
Nuclear energy was presented as an absolutely clean energy source and people interpreted that to mean, “Hey, no problem. There is no waste.” When it became clear that it is, in fact, the most dangerous industrial waste ever produced on the face of the earth, in the form of the irradiated nuclear fuel, the industry then embarked upon a second lie which was, “Yes, we do have this waste product, the irradiated fuel, and it is very dangerous, and it is essentially indestructible, but we know exactly what to do with it. We know how to solve the problem, and the solution is simply to stick it underground in an undisturbed geological formation and then it’s all safe. We just walk away from it, and no problem.”
4. Belated realization of the problemWell, of course, that was then and this is now, and in the light of experience in the intervening years… In the mid-1970s there was a series of reports in Canada, the United Kingdom, the USA and other countries calling attention to this nuclear waste problem and basically saying quite plainly that unless this problem could be adequately solved that there should be no more nuclear power plants built. So I call this the nuclear ultimatum. It was really an ultimatum to the nuclear industry: You do not have a future if you don’t solve this problem. And because the industry said that they knew what to do with it, the expectation was that they could solve it in ten or twenty years. It would only take ten or twenty years……….
DR: But it seems like they want to keep up the impression that the solution is being worked on. It’s underway. As long as they can keep doing that, the nuclear plants can keep running.
GE: That’s correct, and people have been bamboozled by this empty promise really, and of course it’s become increasingly clear. There have been eight attempts in the United States to locate a high-level waste repository, all of which have failed. There have been two underground repositories in Germany which have failed, for low-level and intermediate-level waste. There’s no facility anywhere in the world which is operational for high-level waste, although there are some that have been built like the one in Finland, for example, near Olkiluoto.
5. Barbaric plans for nuclear wasteAnd now we have this consortium of private companies that has come into Canada to deal with not the irradiated nuclear fuel, but the decommissioning waste and the other post-fission waste, and they have come up with what we consider to be barbaric suggestions.One of them is to, just less than one kilometer from a major river—the Ottawa River which flows into the St. Lawrence River and which comes right down here to Montreal flowing through the nation’s capital—they wanted to build a gigantic mound, basically a surface facility, which is simply a landfill, nothing more than a glorified landfill, and put all the low-level and intermediate-level waste into this one facility which would be five to seven stories high and cover an area which would be equivalent to 70 major-league hockey rinks, and this would basically have no solidity to it. It would be just a mound, an earthen mound of radioactive waste, about million cubic meters.
There has been a massive outcry over this. For example, the twenty-eight communities which make up the municipality of Montreal, as an agglomeration of municipalities, have all come out unanimously against this project. And there are over a hundred municipalities up and down the Ottawa River.
DR: How about Ottawa itself?
GE: No, not Ottawa itself, unfortunately. Most of the opposition has come from the Quebec side of the border. There has been far, far less opposition on the Ontario side. Of course, Ontario is also largely dependent upon nuclear power and so that may be the reason why.
We do not find that Canada has produced any enviable plans for nuclear waste disposal. On the contrary, we feel that they’re setting a terrible example for the rest of the world, and we are fighting to stop it cold in its tracks. We actually had a press conference just last week in Ottawa, just the last few days, in fact, and a march and a demonstration and so on, calling upon the federal government to stop these plans which are underway right now.
6. In situ abandonment of nuclear facilitiesIn addition to piling up the waste on the surface, as I was mentioning, in a huge mound, they’re also planning to take four prototype nuclear reactors, or at least two of those four (they haven’t talked about the other two), and use a process of entombment whereby they will simply dump all the radioactive waste from the reactor itself into the sub-basement and then flood the interior of the building with concrete and turn it into a concrete mausoleum, very close to various rivers, including the Ottawa River, and the Winnipeg River in Manitoba. This they call in situ decommissioning. What it means is that you are taking a facility which was originally licensed to house a nuclear reactor, and you’re turning it into a permanent nuclear waste repository, even though it was never chosen with that in mind. It never went through the examination, the scrutiny, and the qualification that would be associated with a permanent waste repository. And yet that’s what they’re planning to do: just wave their magic wand and turn it from a reactor into a waste repository. We are totally opposed to this, and we’re mobilizing citizen opposition to it……….
7. Wrong people in charge, telling rather than consultingThe nuclear industry wants to abandon these wastes because they cannot possibly look after them for the period of time we’re talking about. Who can really? But we feel that they’re the wrong people to be in charge of this because they have a clear conflict of interest, and this conflict of interest manifests itself in many different ways.
There has been no consultation with Canadians to arrive at these plans. These plans have been announced, and then there have been meetings to inform the public of what they’re planning to do, with no opportunity to change those plans other than to criticize them. Basically it is regarded as a fait accompli.
DR: Yeah, in Japan they call those setsumeikai—explanatory meetings, which means it goes in one direction—we’re explaining to you what’s going to happen.
GE: Yeah. This is by no means a consultation. And we’re calling upon the Canadian government to actually stop these plans and to launch true consultations with Canadians and with First Nations, and to follow up on the recommendations that have been made by several independent bodies in Canada, all of which have recommended that there should be a nuclear waste agency completely independent from the nuclear industry and which has on its board of directors major stakeholders, including First Nations people, in order to ensure that the sole efforts of this organization should be the protection of the public and the environment, and not the furtherance of the nuclear industry, the promotion of expansion of the nuclear industry, which is what the consortium is interested in……….https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-back-at-the-achievements-of-the-canadian-coalition-for-nuclear-responsibility-ccnr-http-ww/
Vogtle nuclear project: another multibillion-dollar cost overrun, owners vote to continue
ATLANTA (AP) — The Latest on budget overruns in construction of a Georgia nuclear power facility U.S.News 24 Sept 18
The nation’s only major nuclear power plant under construction appears to still be alive after the owners voted to push forward despite another multibillion-dollar cost overrun.
But Oglethorpe Power says they’re only willing to move forward with the construction of two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant near Waynesboro, Georgia if cost-control measures are implemented.
It is unclear how the other utilities that own a stake in the project will respond to the conditions.
The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Georgia Power, the other two primary owners of the project, had previously said they’re willing to move forward.
The project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
A similar project in South Carolina died in July 2017 when the V.C. Summer plant was abandoned after going billions of dollars over budget.The board of a Georgia utility has voted to continue the expansion of a nuclear power plant that’s years behind schedule and billons of dollars over budget.
The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia’s board voted unanimously Monday to continue building two new reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant near Waynesboro.
That leaves one co-owner, Oglethorpe Power, left to decide whether to move forward or abandon the project.
A third owner, Georgia Power, already indicated it’s ready to push forward.
The critical votes came after a new $2.3 billion cost increase was recognized, bringing the total estimated cost to $27 billion. That triggered a clause in the ownership agreement where 90 percent of ownership needs to agree to forward.
A down vote from Oglethorpe Power could sink the project. Oglethorpe Power is expected to vote on it later this week…….https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2018-09-24/the-latest-georgia-nuclear-plant-gets-tentative-up-vote
Six hundred Lake Superiors needed to dilute nuclear waste to a safe level
A conversation with Dr. Gordon Edwards: contemporary issues in the Canadian nuclear industry, and a look back at the achievements of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), http://www.ccnr.org/ Montreal, August 25, 2018, Nuclear waste management: an exercise in cynical thinking. DiaNuke.org, 24 Sept 18, 2. “……. Six hundred Lake Superiors needed to dilute nuclear waste to a safe levelThe Ontario government had a Royal Commission on electric power planning back in the 70s, and they made this comparison. They said, “Look, just to try and get an idea or try to communicate the toxicity of this material, let’s ask this question: If you took one year’s worth of spent fuel from one CANDU reactor only, and if you wanted to dissolve this in water to the point where the water was contaminated to the maximum legal degree permitted, the maximum degree of contamination for drinking water, how much water would you need for one year’s worth from one reactor?” And the answer is approximately the volume of Lake Superior. So now you multiply that by 600 because we have 20 reactors operating each for 30 years, so it’s 600 times. 600 Lake Superiors! Well, nobody has that much fresh water, so the only purpose of that calculation is simply to highlight the disparity between what we normally think of as toxic and what we must acknowledge as toxic in this setting. 13. No solution assumedSo in my organization, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, we feel that it is wrong to assume that there is a solution. We do not know that there is a solution. These proposed solutions are really untested ideas, and in fact, there is not even a scientific definition of the word disposal. If you look at the IAEA, at the nuclear industry’s definition of disposal, all it says is they have no intention of retrieving it. That’s a political definition, not a scientific definition. There is no scientific criterion which allows you to say, if you check the boxes, “Yes, disposal has been achieved.” In other words, that we have achieved this goal of disposal. We’re really conducting experiments on the planet on the assumption that we can achieve a goal which has never been achieved by the human race ever before. We’ve never actually disposed of anything in the whole history, and now we think that we can dispose of the most toxic material we’ve ever created. So how come we can do it now when we never could before, to truly dispose of this material?………..https://www.dianuke.org/a-conversation-with-dr-gordon-edwards-contemporary-issues-in-the-canadian-nuclear-industry-and-a-look-back-at-the-achievements-of-the-canadian-coalition-for-nuclear-responsibility-ccnr-http-ww/ |
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Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is now open, but radiation fears remain.
Russia and USA will talk about extending New START nuclear weapons treat
US and Russia to discuss nuclear weapons treaty extension in October https://www.ft.com/content/b26d62fe-c0a1-11e8-95b1-d36dfef1b89a, Henry Foy in Moscow
Russia and the US will hold talks on a potential extension to the New START nuclear weapons treaty in Geneva in October, a Russian official said on Tuesday. The future of bilateral treaties that govern the use of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles is one of the most critical issues in US-Russia relations. Experts have warned that the recent breakdown in relations between Washington and Moscow could jeopardise longstanding agreements on so-called ‘strategic stability’ that were designed to prevent nuclear armageddon.
New START, a 2010 agreement that limits the number of nuclear warheads held by both countries, expires in February 2021. Separately, both capitals have accused the other of breaching the 1987 INF Treaty, which limits the use of long-range missiles. “It is absolutely realistic to reach an agreement on an extension [to New START], if there is political will on the part of the American side. There are readiness from the Russian side,” said Vladimir Yermakov, director of the department of non-proliferation and arms control at the Russian foreign ministry. “We have given suggestions on how to do this, and in a couple of weeks we will meet in Geneva within the framework of a bilateral advisory commission,” he added, in comments reported by local newswires.
The US and Russia possess 13,300 nuclear warheads between them, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 92 per cent of the world’s stockpile. New START’s terms allow for a five-year extension, and experts have suggested that writing a whole new agreement would not be possible before its expiry. Regarding the INF Treaty, Mr Yermakov said Russia was “ready to discuss any issues relating to the treaty with our American partners, in any format.” Mr Yermakov added that there was “not a very big possibility” of Russian signing any brand new arms control agreements in the next few years.
Talks to ban nuclear materials need a fresh start
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Paul Meyer, September 25, 2018, If grades in disarmament diplomacy were given out for perseverance, then Canada would surely merit an “A” for its efforts on behalf of the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, or FMCT. Forging this treaty, which would ban the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, has been a supposed goal of the international community for over half a century. In that time, though, negotiations to bring the treaty about never even started, suggesting that the FMCT is one of those worthy goals that are periodically affirmed without any serious effort to realize them. And though Canada has traditionally led efforts to move forward on the treaty, the Canadian-led group most recently charged with supporting future negotiations has submitted a report that deserves a failing grade.
This is unfortunate, because the FMCT, if it ever happens, could have a major impact on reducing nuclear proliferation. The problem is that the 25-member preparatory group asked to facilitate the task of future negotiators has recommended that “the negotiation of a treaty … begin without delay in the Conference on Disarmament.” This is not a realistic solution, as anyone familiar with the Conference on Disarmament knows it does not act “without delay” on anything. It simply does not get things done. To initiate work on the FMCT will require its liberation from this diplomatic dungeon……..
To initiate work on the FMCT will require it to be freed from the constraints of the Conference on Disarmament and granted a fresh start under the authority of a diplomatic body not subject to the veto of any one state. This might be best achieved via a UN General Assembly resolution. Alternatively, a group of concerned states—such as the five official nuclear weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or some other group that possesses fissile material—could undertake ad hoc negotiations.
Until the political will can be generated for such concrete action, the disarmament community should avoid exercises in treading water like the recent FMCT preparatory group. However well-intended, they only provide an illusion of progress, and further erode the credibility of the global nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime. https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/talks-to-ban-nuclear-materials-need-a-fresh-start/
America’s last nuclear power project at risk of cancellation
Last U.S. Nuclear Project Faces `Jeopardy’ as Owners Mull Exit, Bloomberg, By Mark Chediak, Margaret Newkirk, and Ari Natter, September 24, 2018,
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Costs of Southern’s Vogtle project have doubled to $28 billion
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orida utility seeking to cancel contract to buy Vogtle powerThe only nuclear power plant under construction in the U.S. is facing stiff headwinds, as two minority owners are mulling whether to pull out of the $28 billion project led by Southern Co.
Vogtle’s primary municipal co-owners, Oglethorpe Power Corp. and Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, are scheduled to vote Monday whether to move forward with construction on the Vogtle plant in Georgia after Southern’s Georgia Power utility disclosed in August that costs had increased by $2.3 billion.
As the vote looms, a Florida utility is suing to get out of a contract to buy electricity from the plant. Georgia lawmakers, meanwhile, called this week for a price cap on the project.
If one of the major parties decides not to continue, that could put the project in serious jeopardy,” said Kit Konolige, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence.
The Vogtle decision comes at a critical time for the U.S. nuclear industry. Existing reactors are struggling to compete with cheap natural gas and renewables, and efforts to build new ones have all but dried up. Cost overruns forced Scana Corp. to abandon a half-built project in South Carolina last year, leaving Southern and its partners as the only companies left building reactors in the U.S……….https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/last-u-s-nuclear-project-faces-jeopardy-as-owners-mull-exit
Electricity being restored to Brunswick nuclear power station in North Carolina flooded area
Utility begins restoring power to only nuclear plant to shut down during Hurricane Florence https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/utility-begins-restoring-power-to-only-nuclear-plant-to-shut-down-during-hurricane-florence, by Josh Siegel September 20, 2018 Utility company Duke Energy is restoring power at Brunswick nuclear plant in North Carolina after the site closed because of Hurricane Florence, with one reactor in service and the other set to restart soon.
Shannon Brushe, a Duke spokeswoman, confirmed to the Washington Examiner that it returned power Thursday to one of two units at the 1,978-megawatt Brunswick nuclear plant near Wilmington.
Duke had shut down the two reactors as a precaution before Florence hit. It was the only nuclear plant to close in either North or South Carolina because of the storm.
Over the weekend, Duke workers had limited access to the Brunswick plant because of flooding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that the plant was completely surrounded by water, with no way in or out of the facility.
Duke issued an emergency alert to the nuclear watchdog commission on Saturday, called an “unusual event” notice, which is the lowest emergency alert that the power plant is required to issue.
Roads in and out of the power plant’s 1,200-acre campus were impassable, making it impossible to relieve the Duke Energy and federal NRC staff stationed at the plant to ride out Hurricane Florence.
But a NRC spokesperson told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that there is now “adequate access to the plant and no other concerns related to flooding at the Brunsw
As of 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, 114,000 Duke customers — most of them in North Carolina — remained without power.
The danger in transporting nuclear wastes to just a “temporary” nuclear morgue
Activists rally against nuclear waste transport,
Staff Writer,Greenfield Recorder September 21, 2018 GREENFIELD — In a lot of ways it was like a party, celebrating the accomplishments of the past few years: The closures of the Vermont and Rowe nuclear plants. ……..The theme of the night? The high-level nuclear power plant waste being stored in Rowe and Vernon, Vt., must go — but only once the right and final safe place for it is decided.
“I haven’t bothered you for three or four years at this point,” leader of CAN and Rowe resident Deb Katz said. “But we’ve come back to our community to say: We need to be involved again. And I wish it wasn’t so.”
Katz and CAN just begun a tour of New England, and after spending their first two nights in Vermont, they came to Greenfield Thursday. On Friday, they will take the tour to the Statehouse on Beacon Hill.
Currently, the anti-nuclear activists are rallying against a bill that could allow for the high-level nuclear waste in Rowe and Vernon, Vt., to be shipped in canisters across the country to Texas or New Mexico. It would place the waste in what CAN is calling “parking lots” that are seen as more temporary holdings than anything else, but could be pitched as helping tthe economy in these regions in the Southwest of the country.
“Why shouldn’t we just say ‘yes, wow. Thank you so much’? The trouble is this is a really bad idea,” Katz said. “We all want the waste off the site, but we want it done right. And we want it done once.” ………
At the moment there isn’t a distinct solution on where to move the high-level nuclear waste, but Katz and fellow lead organizer Chris Williams of Vermont advovated for more science to figure out the best solution to storing waste that remains toxic for thousands of years.
“It took a lot of hard science to create this mess,” Williams said. “To get rid of this stuff properly, we’re going to have to apply real science and not just political expediency.”
The goal is to look to scientists to find the place for “deep geological storage,” Williams said.
Preaching to find a better, scientific solution was organizer and activist Kerstin Rudek from the Peoples Initiative, based out of Germany, where her neighbors have faced similar issues.
“It’s an international thing,” Rudek said, pointing to the lack of answers of what to do with the nuclear waste and the need for answers. “It’s not just a local thing.”
The meeting, which Williams described as a “little more lively than your usual nuclear waste meeting,” also included the speaker Leona Morgan, from the Navajo Nation and an Albuquerque, N.M. resident.
“It’s great news when we hear a nuclear power plant has been shut down, but it makes me nervous because it makes the push for these false solutions even harder,” Morgan said.
She described the political climate in New Mexico as pitching to residents that moving the nuclear waste there would be good for their economy, creating jobs, but ignoring the will of the residents who might be affected by it most.
“I’m here tonight to tell you we don’t want it,” Morgan said. “We don’t want this waste.”………
You can reach Joshua Solomon at: jsolomon@recorder.com 413-772-0261, ext. 264 https://www.recorder.com/Anti-nuclear-group-CAN-advocated-for-one-final-location-for-waste-at-tour-event-at-Hawks—Reed-20333471
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