Web Edition

Yucca Mountain Slip Sliding Away?

Slip slidin' away

Slip slidin' away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you're slip slidin' away.

Like the Paul Simon song, the Yucca Mountain repository is slip sliding away.  The start up date was first 1998, then 2010, then 2025, and now apparently never.  Unless Congress overturns the projected 2011 Department of Energy (DOE) budget, it calls for $46 million to phase out the project – half for archiving the data and half for site remediation and worker transition. 

 According to the proposed budget, which has not yet been approved by Secretary Chu and the Office of Management and Budget, “All license defense activities will be terminated in December 2009.”  (Energy Daily, November 9, 2009)

view all

Waste Confidence and “Low-Level Waste”

What do we mean by confidence?  Wikipedia describes confidence as “a state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective.”  In contrast, unmerited confidence--believing something or someone is capable or correct when they are not, is described as “arrogance” or hubris.

 What then are we to make of the findings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in their Waste Confidence proceeding.  Following five years of hearings and reflection, the NRC Commissioners found in 1984 that “one or more mined geologic repositories for commercial high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel will be available by the years 2007 – 2009.”  Since Yucca Mountain will not operate by the year 2009 and probably never, is this unmerited confidence, arrogance?

view all

With Santa Fe County’s plans to obtain additional drinking water from the Rio Grande River, there is renewed concern about the levels of radioactive and toxic chemical concentrations in the river.  The project, called the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, would divert Rio Grande waters to complement underground wells and a reservoir presently in use.  The contamination in the river arises from surface and ground waters from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  The lab originated in 1943 as one of the Manhattan Project locations established for the development of the atomic bomb.  Originally, the Laboratory consisted of an array of activities relating to plutonium work and weapon component fabrication, as well as weapon testing sites.  Since World War II the Laboratory has continued to serve as a weapons development location, but has also been used for other nuclear work such as nuclear reactor research, biophysics, and radiobiology. 

view all 

NORM Waste Disposal in Kentucky

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

It’s magic! It’s amazing what a name means.  Change a waste disposal facility into a waste storage facility and Voila!  Waste gone!  

The NORM waste facility, called by Ashland Oil contractors, the Martha Oil Field Storage Cell, holds oil field waste from the region around Martha, Kentucky.  The contaminated earth in the “temporary” landfill is from waste in oil fields.  Drilling produces radioactive and toxic chemical water that was dumped into unlined pits.  The contaminated earth was then centrally located in the Martha Oil Field storage cell, near Martha, Kentucky.  Now what?

view all

Irradiated Papayas at the Honolulu Airport

The last we left you Paina Hawaii proposed irradiating papayas with one million curies of cobalt-60 between two runways of the Honolulu International Airport.  The likelihood of an air crash into the irradiator was on the order of one in a thousand per year.  While airplanes could bring down the World Trade Center, the NRC staff remained confident the irradiator could withstand an air crash.  Well, hold your papayas!  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Hearing Board has decided that the NRC Staff environmental assessment was inadequate.

view all

Imagine building a home without bathrooms.  Who would buy it?  Apparently this is not a problem for Progress Energy Florida (PEF) who wants to build two reactors on the Levy site north of Crystal River on the Gulf Coast, but has no method to dispose of its low-level radioactive waste.  In the construction permit/license hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Green Party and the Ecology Party of Florida, along with Nuclear Information and Resource Service have intervened and questioned the lack of a nuclear bathroom approach.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Pollution License Granted to Gulf Coast Oil Companies

Louisana oil companies were granted a LPDES permit on October 13th. At no surprise to public interest groups overseeing activities of Gulf Coast oil companies and the agency that regulates them, LDEQ, the companies were given everything they wanted, and the public was not given the time of day. All public interest comments were dismissed. The agency set no radioactivity limits on produced water releases into Louisiana coastal waters. The companies do not have to consider the impact of cumulative releases. It’s the new frontier, the Wild West, for oil companies in Louisiana.

view all