U.S.
After serving nearly six years on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Commissioner William Ostendorff said Wednesday he will not seek reappointment, as he has accepted a teaching position with his alma mater, the United States Naval Academy.
“I’ve been privileged to serve NRC since 2010,” Ostendorff said Wednesday during the Platts Nuclear Energy Conference in Washington, D.C. “It’s been a very busy time and an honor to serve. I will leave NRC when my term expires June 30.”
Ostendorff began his first term of just over a year in April 2010, and was sworn in for a second term in July 2011. He said he will teach national security affairs as a professor in the Naval Academy’s Economics Department. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1976 to 2002, retiring as a captain. Before joining the commission, he served as director in two separate roles at the National Academies: for the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy and for the Board on Global Science and Technology.
Ostendorff said post-Fukushima decision-making highlighted his time with the NRC.
INTERNATIONAL
North American waste company US Ecology recorded $122.6 million in pro forma adjusted EBITDA for 2015, based on an earnings report released Friday.
That represents a 11.1 percent improvement from earnings in 2014, when the company recorded $110.4 million in pro forma adjusted EBITDA. The company also released data on fourth quarter earnings, showing $32.6 million in 2015, compared to $29.5 million in 2014.
“Fourth quarter operating results and Pro Forma adjusted EBITDA came in slightly better than we anticipated on stronger Base Business, with key verticals rebounding from disappointing third quarter results,” Us Ecology Chairman and CEO Jeff Feeler said in a statement. “Our Base Business1 grew 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 over the fourth quarter last year led by general manufacturing and refining verticals and was up 6 percent sequentially from the third quarter of 2015 on strength in verticals such as chemical, general and metals manufacturing. As expected, our project-driven Event Business1 was down due the completion of a large east coast clean-up project and continued project deferrals, which are likely to benefit 2016. Our Field and Industrial Services segment continued its growth, outperforming our expectations for the quarter.”
Based in Boise, Idaho, US Ecology provides services for treatment, disposal, and recycling of hazardous and radioactive waste, in addition to field and industrial services. The company also operates in Canada and Mexico.
A research team at the University of Sheffield hopes its findings from a two-year study on cement will improve design efforts as the United Kingdom works to develop its Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) by 2040, according to a press release.
Led by Dr. Claire Corkhill, the research team is analyzing the way cement, a common material in the storage of nuclear waste, reacts with water over hundreds of years. The team is conducting the research at Diamond Light Source, a synchrotron science facility in the U.K. that has been describes as “a giant microscope” used to study the atomic and molecular nature of matter. Members of the team appeared Sunday in Washington, D.C. at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.
“Armed with the knowledge that these phases form, and knowing how quickly, supports the use of our new cement material in the GDF,” Corkhill said in the statement. “We hope that these results will influence the design of the GDF and help improve its long term safety.”
According to the Diamond Light Source statement, Corkhill and her team have discovered that a new cement material for the GDF forms a number of mineral phases known to absorb highly radioactive elements, such as technetium-99.
“The pattern of peaks identified in cement essentially act as a fingerprint telling us which cement minerals are present,” Corkhill said in the statement. “The really exciting thing about using the LDE facility is that we are able to obtain very high resolution, time resolved patterns, something that is not possible using a normal laboratory instrument.”
