Happy Friday, nuke-watchers. Your RadWaste Monitor reporter is still reeling from the Eagles’ tragic loss last Sunday — but at least we got Rihanna. Before we head off into Presidents’ Day weekend, here are some other stories we were tracking from across the civilian nuclear power space this week.
Regulatory standards used to develop the Yucca Mountain geologic repository should be used as a “template” for a modernized framework for a new nuclear waste disposal facility, a prominent nuclear professional organization said in a report this week.
Current generic standards for radioactive waste disposal in the U.S., developed in the 1980s, “are inconsistent with modern international approaches” to health and safety for such practices, the American Nuclear Society (ANS) said in its draft report, published Friday. Instead, the standards used to develop Nevada’s mothballed Yucca Mountain repository, which ANS said are “representative of international best practices” for such facilities, should be used to put together a new, broadly-applicable framework.
Among ANS’s suggested additions to the Yucca Mountain framework, the organization floated expanding regulations beyond mined geologic repositories to new disposal technologies such as boreholes. The modernized framework should also not specifically identify the Department of Energy as the agency responsible for implementing nuclear waste disposal, the report said — a change that would keep the door open for an independent federal nuclear waste agency.
The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog met with Russian officials last week to discuss the safety of Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant, the agency said in a press release.
Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) traveled to Moscow last week as part of the agency’s efforts to “implement a much-needed nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, IAEA said in a press release dated Feb. 10. Grossi met with the head of Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, as well as representatives from Moscow’s foreign ministry.
The status of the Zaporizhzhya plant, a six reactor facility located in eastern Ukraine, has been the subject of international scrutiny since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Fighting around the plant has on several occasions severed outside grid connections necessary for reactor operations. More recently, IAEA has said that increased military activity in the area has delayed a team of international observers from traveling to the facility.
A representative of the utility company decommissioning a California nuclear power plant in an op-ed this week pushed back on what he called “fear mongering” from an anti-nuclear activist,
In the editorial, published Thursday in the San Clemente Times, Southern California Edison strategic planning manager Manuel Camargo said that the company is “focused on the present and future” of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), the shuttered Pendleton, Calif., plant currently being decommissioned. Camargo was responding to a Feb. 9 op-ed by local environmental activist Gary Headrick, who raised concerns that flooding risks at the seaside facility had not been “adequately addressed.”
Camargo, who accused Headrick of “liv[ing] in the past,” said that Southern California Edison continues “to be driven by safety, stewardship and engagement” during SONGS’ decommissioning. “We focus on industrial and nuclear safety, as well as environmental stewardship,” he said.
