The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Aug. 23 began the official procurement process for decommissioning of its long-retired SM-1 reactor on the ground of Fort Belvoir, Va.
Prospective vendors have until 11 a.m. Nov. 4 Eastern time to submit bids, according to the procurement notice. The Army Corps expects to select its contractor in the second half of 2020. Decommissioning must be completed by Sept. 30, 2026, according to the request for proposals.
The contract broadly will cover seven parts, with most having multiple assignments. They are: project management and support services; site preparation, including engineering, construction of a waste storage pad, and permitting; mobilization; disposition of Building 372, including asbestos abatement, decontamination, and demolition; demolition of other structures; demobilization; and reporting.
Most of the operations will be conducted on a firm-fixed-price basis, though there could be incentive fees for the demolition-related tasks.
A site visit for prospective vendors is scheduled for Sept. 16, according to a stakeholder update Sunday from Brenda Barber, project manager for the Environmental and Munitions Design Center at the Army Corps’ Baltimore District. Firms will be allowed to send up to four participants, all of whom must be U.S. citizens. Interested parties must RSVP by Sept. 4 via email to Barber, at [email protected], and contract specialist Tamara Bonomolo, at [email protected].
The SM-1 pressurized-water reactor achieved criticality in April 1957 and operated through March 1973. While it was the first U.S. nuclear power reactor to support a commercial energy grid on a sustained basis, it was primarily used for training personnel in the operating the Army’s nuclear power plants. The reactor was placed into safe storage following deactivation.
The Army Corps expects early next year to complete planning for decommissioning ahead of the application for a U.S. Army permit for decommissioning and demolition. The permit process will require an environmental impact statement or assessment, a waste management or disposal plan, and a final decommissioning plan.
This project will pose several complications, including the limited footprint for work on the Army installation and the proximity to Washington, D.C., the Army Corps has said. Fort Belvoir is less than 20 miles from the nation’s capital.
Barber has said she anticipates six to eight competitive bidders. APTIM Federal Services, which last year completed decommissioning of the Army Corps reactor on the STURGIS barge, has not confirmed whether it would bid on the project. A source said in July that AECOM was considering bidding.
Separately, the Army Corps expects in 2021 to issue the request for proposals for decommissioning of the SM-1A reactor at Fort Greely, Alaska.
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said Wednesday it had completed the last of four new funding agreements to support private manufacturing of the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99).
This means Northwest Medical Isotopes, of Corvallis, Ore., will now receive $15 million from the NNSA that it must fully match.
The announcement comes almost five weeks after the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency said it had set same-sized cooperative agreements with three other firms: Niowave, of Lansing, Mich.; NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, of Beloit, Wis.; and SHINE Medical Technologies, of Janesville, Wis.
Northwest Medical Chief Operating Officer Carolyn Haass declined to discuss the delay in the federal deal for the company, except to say it involved “an action item that DOE forgot to follow-up until the last minute.”
In a statement Friday, the NNSA said “There is no designated timeframe on how long a negotiation for a cooperative agreement will take. Each negotiation is company-specific and negotiation timeframes can vary.”
Molybdenum-99 decays into the isotope technetium-99m, which the NNSA said in a press release is employed in more than 40,000 medical diagnostic procedures daily in the United States. The NNSA supports domestic efforts to produce the isotope without use of highly enriched uranium, which powers reactors that generate molybdenum-99 but also could be diverted for nuclear weapons. The agency previously distributed $100 million to four programs managed by three companies: SHINE, NorthStar, and General Atomics, the latter of which has since been terminated.
All four companies that received the new cooperative agreements will submit monthly invoices to the NNSA to be reimbursed for expenses. The deadline for covered costs is July 2022, the agency said.
Those four companies, plus several others, are striving to re-establish a significant domestic supply of Mo-99 that disappeared from 1989 until 2018. That left the United States reliant on sometimes-unreliable foreign supplies. NorthStar was first to begin generating the isotope, but its rivals are moving quickly with their own programs.
In May 2018, Northwest Medical received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build its molybdenum-99 production plant in Columbia, Mo. The company aims to complete the design for the facility, along with the operations license application for the NRC, by early next year, Haass said. The NNSA funding would be used to help bring the production plant to hot operations by early 2023, she added.
Northwest Medical is teaming with the University of Missouri and Oregon State University for use of their research reactors to irradiate low-enriched uranium targets. The company’s 100,000-square-foot radioisotope production facility would first produce the targets that would be shipped to the universities. After the return of the irradiated targets, Northwest Medical would dissolve them into a solution and process the material at its Missouri plant to produce molybdenum-99. The product would then be shipped for distribution.
Management expects to produce roughly 3,000 6-day curies of molybdenum-99 per week, with capacity for another 1,500 6-day curies in case of higher demand, Haass said.
The 3,000 6-day curie capacity is the amount the NNSA is looking for from each of its partner companies to ensure a stable domestic supply, according to its press release.
In its fiscal 2020 budget plan, the White House requested $10 million for ongoing national laboratory technical support for commercial Mo-99 production without highly enriched uranium. “Future requests for Mo-99 funding will be reviewed on an annual basis,” the NNSA said.
A group of six scientists and nuclear waste experts on Monday renewed their call for Congress to fund the frozen federal licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
Advancing the licensing is both required by law and necessary to avoid saddling future generations with the “financial liabilities” and potential environmental threats of keeping tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste spread around the country, the six members of the Sustainable Fuel Cycle Task Force Science Panel wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“[W]e request your support to move forward our Nation’s currently stalled nuclear waste program,” according to the letter. “In accordance with law and societal need, we urge you to do all that is possible to obtain the necessary funding to resume the critical Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of Yucca Mountain.”
The call for action is in line with previous letters to Congress from the panel dating at least to 2009, according to its website.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the Department of Energy to by Jan. 31, 1998, begin disposal of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants and other high-level radioactive waste. The law was amended five years later to direct that the waste be buried under Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The George W. Bush administration DOE filed its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. Congress has already rejected two attempts by the Trump administration to fund resumption of licensing.
Appropriations legislation passed by the House in June again zeroed out the White House request for roughly $150 million at DOE and the NRC for Yucca licensing, focusing nearly $50 million instead on interim storage for spent fuel. The Senate has yet to issue any appropriations bills for the upcoming fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1, but the upper chamber in recent years has not been friendly to licensing the disposal site.
“It is the collective view of our Panel that it is essential that we move forward with implementing our national repository program and leave our country a better place for future generations,” the six Ph.D.s wrote. “Saddling our children and grandchildren with spent nuclear fuel in dozens of temporary storage locations across the country adjacent to our rivers, lakes, and seashores along with seemingly endless financial liabilities for engineered storage is irresponsible.”
The six members of the panel are: Charles Fairhurst, a mining rock mechanics at the University of Minnesota who has served on bodies including the NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste; Warner North, principal scientist of NorthWorks Inc. and a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board; Ruth Weiner, a principal member of the technical staff at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and also a former member of the NRC Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste; Isaac Winograd, a senior scientist emeritus for the U.S. Geological Survey; Wendell Weart, a retired Sandia lab earth scientist and scientific program manager for DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; and John Kessler, president of J Kessler and Associates and longtime manager of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Used Fuel and High-Level Waste Management Program.
Separately, the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition on Tuesday sent letters to Energy Secretary Rick Perry and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney pressing for funding requests for fiscal 2021 for Yucca Mountain licensing, a pilot consolidated interim site for spent fuel storage, and preparations for transporting used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
“The NWSC is sincerely grateful for DOE’s leadership on nuclear waste management issues, especially the inclusion of these elements in your FY 2018, FY 2019, and FY 2020 budget requests,” according to the letter to Perry. “Our members consistently have supported your nuclear waste management requests in outreach to Congress and look forward to the opportunity to do so with respect to FY 2021.”
The organization, a coalition of nuclear power companies and state public utility agencies, has not written off the current budget process for fiscal 2020, according to Executive Director Katrina McMurrian. “The NWSC is just trying to make sure the Administration is aware of our strong support for its continued request to fund the 3 items noted in the letter,” she said in a Thursday email.
The White House budget plan for fiscal 2021 would be expected no earlier than next February.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s guidance on decommissioning of nuclear power plants has not kept up with an increasingly popular business model in the industry, the agency’s Inspector General’s Office said in a report this week.
The “Audit of NRC’s Transition Process for Decommissioning Power Reactors” found generally that the federal agency effectively oversees sites as they shift from operations to decommissioning. However, there are areas for improvement.
Among them are outdated decommissioning guidance documents kept by the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. The former document has not been refreshed since 2002 and the latter has been largely unchanged since its publication in 2007, the IG said.
This can create complications as the NRC processes license applications to transfer a plant’s federal licenses from the owner and operator to another company that would assume all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management. The agency completed its first proceeding of this type last year for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, and so far in 2019 has approved license transfers for the Oyster Creek Generating Station in New Jersey and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts. Additional applications are anticipated in coming years.
Agency “staff mentioned a recent license transfer request has posed some logistical problems. A licensee recently submitted its [mandatory post-shutdown decommissioning activities report] simultaneously with a license transfer request, the PSDAR of the proposed decommissioning company, and related exemptions for both entities,” the IG report says. “The licensee also asked for it to be completed on an expedited basis. This strained NRC resources since staff had to review everything at once, to include the review of the PSDAR and exemption requests from an entity that was not yet the licensee.”
This creates the situation is which staff might be evaluating documents from a company that might not be approved to assume the site licenses, the IG said.
The report recommends updating the two offices’ decommissioning guidance to address the license transfer business model and other matters. The NRC should also establish an official project manager knowledge transfer method for nuclear decommissioning, according to the IG.
The agency has 30 days to submit information regarding steps it has taken or plans to take to address the recommendations, according to Brett Baker, assistant inspector general for audits.
Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is joining the board of directors for medical isotope manufacturers SHINE Medical Technologies.
Ryan represented Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District for 20 years, until retiring from Congress at the beginning of this year. The district includes the city of Janesville, where SHINE is headquartered and Ryan has lived since leaving Congress (though he is returning to the Washington, D.C., area, per Politico.)
“Paul is a visionary with a wealth of experience and an expansive network that are welcome additions to SHINE’s board,” SHINE founder and CEO Greg Piefer said in a press release. “Paul will provide critical guidance to SHINE as we expand into domestic and international markets that require deep mastery of global policy, economics and leadership. His knowledge of domestic and international health care and energy policy will be an invaluable guide to us. We also are excited to be working with someone who cares about building great things in Janesville as deeply as we do.”
SHINE Is one of a number of companies looking to restore domestic production of the medical isotope molybdenum-99, which decays into another isotope, technetium-99m, that is used globally in medical diagnostics. The company in May broke ground on a facility that will house its accelerator-based production technology, and hopes to begin commercial output by 2021.
“SHINE is uniquely equipped to create a reliable global supply of lifesaving medical isotopes, which would allow patients around the world to receive diagnosis and treatment when they need it most,” Ryan said in the release. “Companies like SHINE play an important role in the delivery of cutting-edge health care and I will be able to help the company continue to grow.”
Ryan, 49, was speaker of the House from October 2015 until January, following the November midterm elections in which Democrats retook the majority in the lower chamber. He also was the Republican candidate for vice president in 2012 and now sits on the board of Fox Corp.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is taking public comments on a draft rules package that would set specific radioactivity limits and other restrictions on disposal of technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material (TENORM) waste in the state.
This is the state’s second effort to establish regulations on TENORM disposal: A package issued in August 2017 was withdrawn the following January for revisions “to address public concern and stakeholder input,” DEQ said at the time.
The new proposed regulations generally address areas including designing and building waste sites, operations, financial resources, reporting a spill, and site closure and post-closure.
Among the specific planned provisions: A TENORM waste management system license will be required for building, expanding, or operating such a system; the license application must feature a design, operations and management plan, and closure and post-closure plan that comply with state environmental quality regulations; material entering a TENORM waste management site could not exceed 200 microroentgen per hour of X-ray or gamma radiation, as determined by gate screening; a TENORM waste unit, on average, could not exceed 50 picocuries per gram of combined radium-226 and radium-228; financial assurances will be required, based on federal rules for financial assurances for municipal solid waste landfills.
TENORM is naturally radioactive material that has come into contact with the environment or has been concentrated as a result of human activities, such as oil and natural gas production. Montana is among the top 20 states for both production of crude oil and natural gas, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Administration.
The draft rules were prepared with assistance from a working group of nongovernmental groups, members of industry, local government representatives, scientists, and Montana residents.
Comments must be submitted by 5 p.m. Mountain time on Oct. 21 to Sandy Scherer, Legal Secretary, Department of Environmental Quality, at: 1520 E. Sixth Ave., P.O. Box 200901, Helena, MO 59620-0901l by fax to 406-444-4386; or by email to [email protected].
Public hearings on the rules plan are scheduled for Sept. 25 in Glendive and Oct. 10 in Helena.
A Finnish construction company has received another contract for excavation of tunnels for the nation’s spent fuel repository.
Posiva Oy, the organization in charge of the project, on Wednesday announced the award of the 17 million-euro contract to Helsinki-based YIT. The contract will cover two central tunnels and five disposal tunnels, according to a YIT press release. Excavation is scheduled to begin late this year and to last two-and-a-half years.
This is YIT’s third excavation contract for Posiva.
“During our previous contracts, our cooperation with Posiva was very smooth and we are very pleased to be able to continue this cooperation through such a challenging new contract,” Aleksi Laine, YIT senior vice president for rock and special engineering, said in the release. “YIT has a lot of experience in demanding tunnel construction and for us, this new contract represents an interesting opportunity to leverage the strong competence we have.”
Posiva, owned by two Finnish energy companies, is building the disposal facility for used fuel from nuclear power plants. The material will be buried between 400 and 450 meters underground at Olkiluoto island. Disposal is scheduled to begin in the 2020s, with the facility being closed off about a century later.
Finland has four reactors at two power plants, with a fifth reactor under construction, according to Posiva.
