Happy Friday, nuke watchers! Your RadWaste reporter is Phoenix-bound for the annual Waste Management Symposium, and will have the new season of Netflix’s Formula One documentary prepped for the flight. Before that, though, here are a few more stories from around the civilian nuclear-power space we were tracking this week.
A train derailment in Ohio that caused the release of hazardous chemicals into the environment is proof positive that the country’s only legally-designated site to store spent nuclear fuel should never be finished, a Las Vegas paper’s editorial board said this week.
The Feb. 3 rail accident in East Palestine, Ohio “underscores the rights of communities to know and control what they might be exposed to as it rolls through their backyards” and demonstrates why Nevada’s Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository “needs to be officially taken off the table,” the Las Vegas Sun wrote in an editorial Sunday. The paper’s editorial board raised concerns that spent fuel shipped by rail could “threaten millions of lives” in the event of a derailment.
Yucca Mountain site has yet to be finished, let alone receive a rail shipment of nuclear waste. The project was put on ice in 2010 by the Barack Obama administration, which pulled the site’s funding. President Joe Biden’s White House has said it would keep the project mothballed. The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, ships radioactive waste from its Naval Reactors program to a disposal facility at Idaho National Laboratory.
Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Kristine Svinicki has joined the board of an energy holding company, according to a press release published this week.
Svinicki, who was NRC’s top regulator from 2017 until 2021, was elected to Pinnacle West Capital Corp.’s board of directors and will join the company’s audit and nuclear operating committees, according to the Wednesday press release. Phoenix-based Pinnacle West holds about $23 million in energy assets and is the parent company of Arizona Public Service, the utility company that operates the state’s Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.
Svinicki left NRC after serving three years of her latest five-year term. She was the longest tenured NRC commissioner in history, having served on the body since 2008. Since departing the agency, she has also been elected to the Southern Company’s board of directors and accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan’s nuclear engineering and radiological science department.
Thousands of Massachusetts residents have signed a petition asking Holtec International not to follow through on its plan to discharge radioactive wastewater from a nuclear power plant under decommissioning.
The petition, addressed to Holtec CEO Krishna Singh, implored the company to “retract” its proposal to release nearly one million gallons of irradiated water from Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station’s spent fuel pool into the nearby Cape Cod Bay. “The people, the tens of thousands of residents of Plymouth and Cape Cod, and the million tourists who visit this area each year, have made it clear that we would prefer for this water to not be released into our beloved Cape Cod Bay,” the petition said. “The wishes of people, the real human beings who live here in the shadow of the nuclear plant, ought to supersede all the science, permits, [et cetera].”
As of Friday, the petition had nearly 15,000 signatures. Holtec, meanwhile, has said that it would not discharge any water from the Plymouth, Mass., Pilgrim plant until it receives a permit modification mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency. However, the company has defended the practice, saying that wastewater releases are normal for nuclear decommissioning, and that other disposal options — such as trucking the water off site — are not feasible.
It has been a “difficult and challenging” year for nuclear safety thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations’ nuclear power authority said in a report released this week.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report, published Thursday and about a year after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion, highlights the agency’s efforts to “reduc[e] the likelihood of a nuclear accident or incident” during the Ukraine conflict, during which several of the country’s nuclear power plants were damaged by shelling. IAEA has provided safety and security equipment to Ukrainian plant staff and established staff presence at nuclear sites across the country, the report said. The agency has also made efforts to create a demilitarized buffer zone around Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, which is located along the front lines in Eastern Ukraine.
“As this tragic war enters its second year, I want to reassure the people of Ukraine and the international community that they can count on the IAEA … to do everything possible within our remit to assist them and to avert the danger of a nuclear accident that could cause even more suffering where there is already far too much,” agency director-general Rafael Grossi said in the report.
