NRC HISTORIAN RECEIVES PRESTIGIOUS AWARD FOR YUCCA MOUNTAIN BOOK

J. Samuel Walker, an NRC historian for more than 30 years, has been awarded the Richard W. Leopold Prize for his book “Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the U.S.” The prize is given every two years by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for the best book written by a government historian. In the book, published by University of California Press, Walker traces the U.S. government’s efforts to deal with radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project through the 1987 designation of Yucca Mountain as a high-level waste repository. According to the OAH, the book is “solidly researched and effectively written” and makes “an original and insightful contribution to understanding this important story.” The OAH also noted the book includes “perspectives beyond the government, especially interest groups and protest movements.”

DOE EM Testimonials (1)

DOE EM Testimonials (1)Assistant Secretary Triay's Written Statement before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development (March 16, 2010)from DOE EM Testimonials by DOE Environmental Management

Community ready for talks on future of Hanford lands

Herald editorial staff; Sivula Chris444 words26 March 2010Tri-City HeraldTRICA8English(c) 2010 The Tri-City Herald. All Rights Reserved.

Community leaders are right to push for more say in Hanford’s future, and they need to keep up the pressure.
Planning for life after cleanup needs to be a partnership between the Tri-Cities and the Department of Energy.
In a recent letter to Ines Triay, DOE assistant secretary for environmental management, Tri-City political leaders and economic development officials turned up the heat.
Forging a common vision doesn’t seem out of reach, but the process could benefit from a greater sense of urgency.

Tests show DOE waste meets state standards

Judy Fahys /By Judy Fahys The Salt Lake Tribune/619 words/5 April 2010/The Salt Lake Tribune/SLTR
/nglish/© 2010 The Salt Lake Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Samples of the depleted uranium waste from a government cleanup in South Carolina show that it meets a key safety limit, said the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
State regulators heard about the test results Monday from a Tennessee laboratory, which sampled 171 of the 5,400 drums sent most recently to Utah from the Savannah River Project cleanup for technetium-99, a waste product of reprocessing.
Gov. Gary Herbert requested the tests after the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah and a scientist at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research challenged whether the Savannah River DU has too much technetium-99 for EnergySolutions Inc.'s low- level radioactive waste landfill in Tooele County.
In its initial assessment years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy had checked samples from just 33 of about 15,000 drums. And, because of the way the waste was generated, there was a potential for an excess of contaminants that are only permitted in Utah at trace levels, the environmental groups said.
"We took a much more conservative and thorough approach to sampling," said DEQ Director Amanda Smith. "We believe that given questions raised about the nature of this waste, the state should do its due diligence and perform additional tests."

Triay says Yucca decision won't delay Hanford cleanup; Murkowski differs

 Derek Sands, Elaine Hiruo /907 words/22 March 2010/Inside Energy/IE/13/ISSN: 1556-3928/English/(c) 2010 McGraw-Hill, Inc. /

The Obama administration's decision to terminate a long-planned nuclear-waste repository in Nevada will not disrupt the Energy Department's cleanup schedule at a highly contaminated Hanford Site in Washington state, a senior DOE official said last week, despite warnings from a prominent senator that delays will occur and states will file lawsuits in response."It is not slowing down the current work," Ines Triay, assistant secretary for environmental management, said at a hearing Wednesday. "We are talking about that decision not being on the critical path, not preventing the cleanup at Hanford to move forward. ... [Current] activities do not necessitate a decision for disposal, especially because we are going to be producing a very protective waste form." Waste from Hanford, a former nuclear weapons facility, was destined for the national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada until the administration decided to kill the project last year. Washington's attorney general, Rob McKenna, has expressed concern that the decision will mean delays at Hanford, one of the largest nuclear cleanup projects in the world.

Tank farm safety management criticized

Annette Cary;Herald staff writer Cary Annette774 words19 March 2010Tri-City HeraldTRIC B1English(c) 2010 The Tri-City Herald. All Rights Reserved.

A federal oversight board has concerns about whether the safety management system used at Hanford’s tank farms is adequate. The tank farm contractor’s work planning directives “are unnecessarily complex and confusing,” among other problems, said a letter sent by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to Ines Triay, the Department of Energy assistant secretary for environmental management. The safety board requested a report within 90 days outlining actions taken or planned by the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection and its tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS). The Office of River Protection also has had concerns and sent a letter to its contractor five months ago saying that “less-than adequate work packages and procedures have been released for work.” “This has resulted in work being stopped, workers performing steps out of sequence, workers not performing steps when they are required to be performed, work being performed to the wrong requirements and personnel being placed at risk,” it said.

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Takoma Park, Md; IEER: French-Style Nuclear Reprocessing Will Not Solve U.S. Nuclear Waste Problems

285 words/23 April 2010/Energy Weekly News/ENRGWK/122/English/ Copyright 2010 Energy Weekly News via NewsRx.com /

2010 APR 23 - (VerticalNews.com) -- Contrary to some prevailing opinion, reprocessing would not eliminate the need for a deep geologic disposal program to replace Yucca Mountain. It aggravates waste, proliferation, and cost problems. The volume of waste to be disposed of in deep geologic repository is increased about six times on a life-cycle basis in the French approach compared to the once-through no-reprocessing approach of the United States.
A new report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nonprofit scientific research group, shows that France uses less than 1 percent of the natural uranium resource, contrary to an impression among some policy makers. The report has several recommendations for President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which was created to address U.S. nuclear waste issues after the administration's cancellation of the Yucca Mountain program.
. Arjun Makhijani, the author of the report: "In recent years, a 'French fever' has gripped the promoters of nuclear power in the United States. Praise of France's management of spent fuel by reprocessing, including its use of the extracted plutonium as fuel in its nuclear power reactors, is now routinely heard. But it is a fantasy on the scale of the 1950s "too cheap to meter" mythology about nuclear power to imagine that 90 or 95 percent of the "energy value" of U.S. spent fuel can be extracted by reprocessing."

Yucca closing takes timeout

Steve Tetreault /651 words/15 April 2010/The Las Vegas Review-Journal/LVGS/1A/English/© 2010 The Las Vegas Review-Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved. /By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The Department of Energy on Wednesday halted dismantling of the Yucca Mountain project, offering a 21-day timeout so federal judges can weigh the latest legal challenges to the planned scrapping of the nuclear waste project.

The freeze until May 5 appears to prevent for now the termination of the department's contract with USA Repository Services, the project's main operating company. According to a document filed in court, the Department of Energy was to issue a termination letter Friday, with the contractor stopping work immediately. Also during the period, "we aren't planning to take any actions to eliminate positions, terminate contracts or cut the work force," DOE spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller said. Fewer than 600 workers remain on the Las Vegas-based project, which has been shrinking through transfers, layoffs and attrition since the Obama administration began bringing it to an end.

Plutonium level in waste to triple

By Rob Pavey, The Augusta Chronicle, Ga. /McClatchy-Tribune Regional News/394 words/15 April 2010/The Augusta Chronicle (MCT)/KRTAG/English/Distributed by McClatchy - Tribune Information Services /

Apr. 15--The amount of plutonium in high-level waste converted to glass at Savannah River Site will nearly triple this year as a consequence of the U.S. Energy Department's decision to abandon its Yucca Mountain waste repository. The SRS-based Defense Waste Processing Facility uses a process called vitrification to convert liquid radioactive wastes into a solid glass form suitable for long-term storage and permanent disposal. Plutonium is among many dangerous materials in the 36 million gallons of waste left behind at SRS by decades of nuclear weapons production. In 2008, as the department prepared its application to license the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada -- where vitrified waste was to be buried -- SRS lowered plutonium levels in vitrified waste from 2,500 grams per cubic meter to 897 grams per cubic meter. The reduction would allow SRS waste to meet Yucca Mountain's acceptance criteria -- but would have increased the number of canisters needed to hold the remaining vitrified waste from 4,000 to 9,000, according to a 2008 memo. Once the Energy Department made the decision to stop work on Yucca Mountain, the plutonium levels were restored to the higher concentrations in hopes of reducing the need for so many canisters, according to site officials.

STATEMENT OF DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY PRESS SECRETARY STEPHANIE MUELLER ABOUT YUCCA MOUNTAIN

139 words/14 April 2010/States News Service/SNS(c) 2010 States News Service

The following information was released by the U.S. Department of Energy:Statement of Department of Energy Press Secretary Stephanie Mueller about Yucca Mountain
"We are confident that we have the legal authority to withdraw the application for the Yucca Mountain repository. However, the parties need some time to prepare and the Court needs time to consider the issues. We are proposing to halt temporarily any actions to shut down Yucca Mountain simply to provide that time. As the Secretary has said consistently, Yucca Mountain is not an option and he looks forward to receiving the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission for the long term management of our spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste."

DC's oversight of Hanford construction increases

By SHANNON DININNY /Associated Press Writer412 words/14 April 2010/8:24/Associated Press Newswires/APRS/English/(c) 2010. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - Federal officials in Washington, D.C., are assuming a larger role overseeing construction of a massive plant to treat radioactive waste in south-central Washington.
The $12 billion vitrification plant at the Hanford nuclear reservation is among the largest industrial construction projects nationally, both in cost and sheer size. The plant is being built to convert highly radioactive waste into a safe form for permanent disposal.
The Energy Department has largely overseen plant construction from its Office of River Protection at Hanford. According to an internal Energy Department memo, dated March 31 and obtained by The Associated Press, a full-time staffer in Washington D.C. will oversee the project, thus ensuring someone in the nation's capitol is intricately involved with the high-profile project.
The move allows the project director at Hanford greater access to resources in the nation's capital, Energy Department spokeswoman Carrie Meyer said.
"The Department of Energy remains committed to ensuring that the Hanford waste treatment plant project is completed safely on time and on budget," she said.

Hanford reactor may be removed instead of cocooned

By ANNETTE CARY 846 words/14 April 2010/12:11Associated Press Newswires
APRSEnglish(c) 2010. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

TRI-CITIES, Wash. (AP) - A decision could be made in June on whether to raze Hanford's K East Reactor, a break from the practice of leaving reactor cores to radioactively decay for decades.The Department of Energy has developed a tentative plan for pulling out the guts of the reactor, but continues to gather more information to make sure the work could be done safely and economically.The plan for Hanford's nine production reactors -- other than B Reactor which may be preserved as a museum -- has been to cocoon them. They are torn down to little more than their radioactive cores, reroofed and sealed up for 75 years to let radiation decay to more manageable levels.But the K East Reactor has significant contamination of soil adjacent and possibly beneath the reactor. It's left from past leaks from its cooling basin, which was used to store irradiated fuel that was not processed to remove plutonium after the Cold War ended.

Washington state sues to stop federal government from abandoning Yucca Mountain waste site

By SHANNON DININNY Associated Press Writer509 words13 April 201018:27
Associated Press NewswiresAPRSEnglish(c) 2010. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - Washington state filed suit Tuesday to stop the federal government from permanently abandoning the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, marking the latest clash in a long-standing dispute over where the nation's nastiest radioactive waste should be stored.
Waste and spent nuclear fuel from south-central Washington's Tri-Cities, site of the highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation and the Northwest's only commercial nuclear plant, had long been intended to go to Yucca Mountain.Opponents in Nevada for years have been fighting the proposed desert mountain repository 90 miles from Las Vegas.The U.S. Department of Energy has said the site is no longer considered an option for radioactive waste storage. It has a motion pending to withdraw its license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission "with prejudice," which would permanently remove it from consideration as the nation's radioactive waste repository.

Nuclear Waste May Get A Second Life

1315 words April 2010 NPR: Morning Edition MGED English © 2010 NPR®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For permission to reuse NPR content, see http://www.npr.org/about/permissioninfo.html. 

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
The Obama administration is promoting nuclear power, and that's complicated by the fact that it has also put an end to plans to bury nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.So a blue-ribbon committee is pondering what to do with the waste. One option they're considering is a process that would dramatically reduce its radioactive lifetime, as NPR's Richard Harris reports.
RICHARD HARRIS: Less than one percent of spent reactor fuel is made up of radioactive elements that last hundreds of thousands of years.And Sherrell Greene at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee says the technology to remove those troublesome elements from waste is as old as nuclear reactors themselves.
Mr. SHERRELL GREENE (Oak Ridge National Laboratory): So you're standing at the face of the X-10 graphite reactor, the world's first continuously operating reactor...
HARRIS: Greene points up at a 24-foot-tall graphite block that's dotted with holes about the size of corks. It looks nothing like a power reactor because it never was. Instead, it was called an atomic pile. And back in the 1940s, the world's first nuclear engineers used long metal rods to slide slugs of uranium into the holes along the front face. Nuclear reactions inside the pile turned uranium into slugs to plutonium and a host of other radioactive elements.
Mr. GREENE: It's hard to see it, but the slugs would fall out the back and there's a trench. And the trench would – you know, we see the transport trench right here, and it would be moved along to the reprocessing building.

Difficult Hanford cleanup job begins on hot cells

By ANNETTE CARY 652 words9 April 201011:37Associated Press NewswiresAPRS
English(c) 2010. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.



TRI-CITIES, Wash. (AP) - Work has begun to stabilize and remove highly contaminated hot cells that stand up to three stories high at Hanford.It is the most difficult, complex and hazardous work that Washington Closure Hanford expects to face in demolishing old nuclear facilities at Hanford along the Columbia River, said Tom Kisenwether of Washington Closure.The five hot cells being cleaned up are in the 324 Building in Hanford's 300 Area just north of Richland. They were built to allow Hanford employees to work with highly radioactive materials without being exposed to radiation.Workers would stand outside the hot cells and use controls to operate manipulators inside the cells, watching what they were doing through leaded-glass windows.The tallest of the cells is narrow and stands three stories tall. But the largest has dimensions of 24-by-30-by-16 feet.