Nevada on Tuesday extended a contract with a Texas-based law firm to continue fighting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository for another six months at a cost of roughly $1 million.
Extending the contract of Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Lawrence, which also has an office in Washington, D.C., was one of many business items considered by the Nevada Board of Examiners in Carson City. The deal, awarded in 2013 and originally worth about $5 million, now runs through March 30 and has a total value of roughly $8.5 million.
Under the deal, the firm “provides ongoing outside counsel to assist with the Yucca Mountain litigation and to represent the state before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on issues related to the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive repository program,” according to the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.
Funding for the contract comes from the Nevada Attorney General’s Office, which itself is funded through a biennial appropriation from the state legislature. In the last state budget, approved in June, the legislature approved more than $7 million to fight Yucca Mountain over the next two years, including $3.8 million for the state’s Agency for Nuclear Projects and about $3.4 million for the Nevada Attorney General’s Office.
The Donald Trump administration wants to restart the Energy Department’s application to license Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., as a permanent disposal facility for nuclear waste. The White House requested $150 million for the effort in fiscal 2018: $120 million for DOE and $30 million for the NRC, which has sole power to approve the license application.
House appropriators essentially approved the Yucca restart, but Senate appropriators did not. The three-month stopgap spending bill approved last week delayed the final showdown over Yucca funding in 2018 to Dec. 8.
There is widespread, though not unanimous, opposition to the project in Nevada, including from the state’s governor, attorney general, and almost its entire congressional delegation in Washington.
Decommissioning of the radioactively contaminated STURGIS barge resumed this week at the Port of Galveston after Hurricane Harvey swept through coastal Texas in late August, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday.
There was no damage to the STURGIS or the decommissioning facility, and no signs that any radiation had been released into the environment, according to an update from Brenda Barber, project manager for the Army Corps Baltimore District’s Environmental and Munitions Design Center.
Work had stopped ahead of the storm, and the hurricane plan for the project activated to ensure the vessel was water tight and the full site secure, Barber told RadWaste Monitor in a follow-up email. Environmental monitoring of the site was suspended under the hurricane plan, but has since been re-established.
The STURGIS is a onetime World War II Liberty Ship that was subsequently equipped with a nuclear reactor to provide power for U.S. military and civilian operations in the Panama Canal in the 1960s and 1970s. It was towed from Virginia to the Port of Galveston in 2015 for decommissioning and disassembly.
As of June, 98 percent of the radioactivity on the barge, in the form of over 850,000 pounds of components, had been extracted and transported to permanent storage at Waste Control Specialists’ waste complex in West Texas.
“After all of the radioactive materials have been removed, the team will access the hull bottom tanks to complete the required surveys to allow the vessel to be released for shipbreaking,” Barber wrote.
The project is scheduled to be fully completed in summer 2019, a year after the previously anticipated finishing date. Decommissioning should wrap up by January of that year, followed by completion of reporting and project wrap-up documentation by the following August, Barber stated. In total, the project is expected to cost $66.5 million.
The contractor for decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal is CB&I Federal Services LLC.
The cleanup contractor for the Dounreay fast reactor site in Scotland said Tuesday it has begun extracting all leftover radioactive fuel elements from the nuclear facility.
The majority of the core fuel was extracted shortly after the test reactor closed in 1977. However, roughly 1,000 fuel elements remained inside after they were found to be “swollen and jammed,’ according to a press release from Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd.
The elements are now finally being taken out, following years of development and testing of remote-control gear needed for the job. The removal project is expected to last three years, after which the reactor itself can be dismantled.
“The safe and timely retrieval of the breeder material is crucial to both the site’s closure programme and the national defueling programme,” David Peattie, chief executive of the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the nondepartmental body that oversees nuclear cleanup across the nation, said in the release.
The cost of the fuel elements extraction program was not immediately stated.
Finding of the damaged elements largely put a halt to decommissioning at Dounreay for two decades. It took over a decade to remove and eradicate 57 metric tons of highly reactive liquid metal in which the fuel elements were held, the release says. That enabled deployment of remote-controlled cameras to determine the elements’ status.
The reactor’s breeder material is being moved to a breeder containment facility to be opened for removal of uranium fuel slugs, cleaning, and preparation for shipment to the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria. Roughly 40 metric tons of breeder material from prior removals is already at Sellafield.
Sellafield Ltd. Chairman Tony Fountain is exiting after less than two years on the job to take a position as chair of India-based Essar Oil, the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said Friday.
Fountain started on the job on April 1, 2016, as the company managing cleanup and operations of the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria became a wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA, the nondepartmental executive organization that oversees remediation of the United Kingdom’s nuclear complex. His final board meeting is scheduled for later in September.
Nigel Smith, a Sellafield Ltd. senior independent nonexecutive director, will take over as acting chairman while the NDA looks for a permament replacement for Fountain.
The Sellafield Ltd. board chairmanship is a three-year position, which can be renewed via “mutual agreement” between the chair and NDA. In announcing Fountain’s selection in January 2016, NDA said the chair’s role was to “lead the board of non-executive and executive directors in driving safe and secure progress and value for money in the delivery of the mission at Sellafield.”
Fountain, a veteran of the oil industry, previously served as NDA chief executive officer from 2009 to 2011.
Smartphone technology revolutionized the way people make dinner reservations and get their news, but it hasn’t done much to enhance public discourse on nuclear waste management, according to Pajarito Scientific Corp. President and CEO George Dials.
“I’ve never seen a time when there was such an impasse in merely communicating,” Dials, an industry veteran who has held senior posts with organizations such as Babcock & Wilcox and the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Thursday at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Summerlin, Nev.
Dials added that the current problems run deeper than social media and communications technology. When radioactive waste is mentioned, the public makes no real distinction between spent reactor fuel from power plants, defense waste, or medical waste, Dials said.
The regulatory establishment hasn’t done much to help the situation, he added, citing broadly and poorly defined waste definitions. There are also “chaotic and often conflicting actions to identify, certify, and open nuclear waste sites,” Dials said.
Better, simpler characterization would make it easier to inform the public, Dials said. “We have made it more complex than it needs to be,” he added.
Right now, Dials said, significant amounts of spent reactor fuel are stored at nuclear plants in states such as Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, which were in the path of Hurricane Irma.
“All things being equal, it’s going to be a really tough 2018,” Dials said.
Dials said he would like to see government do a better job of “risk-based” categorization of radioactive waste.
In addition, policy makers should better answer fundamental questions, Dials said. These include: How much waste is there? What are the major categories and risk profiles? Who owns it? Where is it located now?
While Dials called the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future a “pre-emptive strike” against the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which has found fresh life under the Trump administration, he said the panel’s 2012 report did come up with some good recommendations.
Dials liked the commission’s idea of creating a quasi-governmental agency with real funding authority to address waste issues. One shortcoming, however, of the commission’s “consent-based” siting approach is that it didn’t specify “whose consent,” Dials said.
Nuclear business development consultant Jan Carlin has been named managing director of Waste Management Symposia.
In a press release Tuesday, the nonprofit organization touted Carlin’s “extensive technical and business-development experience across both the DOE Complex and the commercial nuclear industry.”
Carlin is director of business development for Wälischmiller Engineering GmbH, a Markdorf, Germany-based producer of remote-control technology and related systems for the nuclear and chemical industries.
She began her career at Westinghouse Electric before founding and managing Rainmaker Environmental Options Consultants and Engineers for more than two decades, according to her LinkedIn profile. Carlin is also owner of Carlin Consulting Services.
Carlin replaces Jim Voss, who stepped down at the end of June after nearly 15 years as managing director.
“I am looking forward to making a great organization of even more value to the industry, and a more significant voice in the public and policymaker discussions taking place around the world,” Carlin said in the release.
Waste Management Symposia organizes the Waste Management Conference, a major nuclear industry event held every March in Phoenix. The 2018 conference, scheduled for March 18-22, will focus on nuclear and industrial robotics, remote systems, and other developing technologies, according to the WMS website.
From the Wires
From the Orange County Register: Activists battle over settlement on San Onofre nuclear plant waste storage.
