The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week appointed Brooke Clark its new general counsel, effective Oct. 15. Clark will be the agency’s chief legal advisor. She will replace Marian Zobler who was to retire, the agency wrote in a news release.
Since 1998, when she joined the NRC for the first time, Clark has bounced to and from the agency and private practice, the commission said.
William “Ike” White, senior adviser and acting head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, spoke Monday to an international forum in Japan on Decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the agency said this week.
The 7th annual international forum on Fukushima cleanup sponsored by Japan’s Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation, attracted more than 500 participants during the two-day event, DOE said in a news release.
In a debate last week with other Republican presidential candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy reiterated his position that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should be abolished.
Ramaswamy posted his plans for dismantling the NRC to YouTube on Aug. 5. He said that, if elected, he would lay off roughly half the agency’s staff and reassign the other half among the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
Ramaswamy saw a surge in national polls after the first Republican primary debate, according to the website 538, though he remained a distant third behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former President Donald Trump (R), the clear front runner in the race. Republicans were to officially nominate their candidate for the 2024 presidential race at their convention in Milwaukee, scheduled to begin July 15.
Van Buren County Michigan held a meeting this week on the economic effects of closing the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, one of the county’s biggest employers.
The plant shut down in 2022 but Holtec International, which purchased the plant from Entergy to decommission it, is trying to fire the reactor back up. The company met this week with Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff in Rockville, Md., to share plans that could lead to the reactor restarting in August 2025.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week issued findings of no significant environmental impacts for the decommissioning funding plans for independent spent fuel installations at two shuttered nuclear power plants.
The findings, published in the Federal Register, are essentially NRC’s determination that the storage facilities, which contain spent fuel consumed by their plants’ reactors, will not adversely affect the environment while the plants are taken apart and demolished.
Orano Decommissioning Services last week said it cut the shuttered reactor vessel that once powered the Crystal River 3 nuclear plant into three pieces.
The segmented reactor will be stored on site at Florida’s central Gulf coast, Orano wrote in a press release.
Saudi Arabia may buy a nuclear power plant from China, the Wall St. Journal reported last week [paywall], citing Saudi sources.
The Saudis warmed to the Chinese bid because the U.S. would not allow nuclear exports to Riyadh unless the kingdom agreed to restrictions on uranium enrichment, a usual condition of U.S. exports.
Japan’s English-language Kyodo News service last week reported that no detectable amount of tritium was found in fish sampled off Japan’s east coast after Tokyo Electric Power company discharged treated radioactive wastewater from cleanup of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean.
The news service cited a Japanese government announcement. Discharges began on Aug. 24, Kyodo reported. The Fukushima Daiichi plant’s reactor melted down in 2011 after a tsunami caused by an offshore earthquake.
