Nuclear waste issues freeze permits for U.S. power plants

"There are currently 104 operating nuclear reactors at 64 plants across the country. Half are over 30 years old."

 http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/news/economy/nuclear-plants-waste/index.htm?iid=HP_LN&hpt=hp_t3

AN Open Letter to Virginia Activists on Keep the Uranium Ban in VA

Comment:  Please vote to keep the Ban in VA plus write the leaders of VA and tell them to keep the ban too!

AN Open Letter to Virginia Activists on Keep the Uranium Ban in VA
Greetings

We need everyone's participation to prevail against the imminent threat of uranium mining in Virginia.

Lifting the moratorium would open the floodgates to numerous mining opportunists throughout Virginia and with questionable safety nets and oversight. If mining happens then Virginia will become environmentally defiled forever. Contaminated water sources would bring a blight upon Virginia and compromise the health of its citizens for many generations. Watershed left in the wake of mining would stand as a ready vehicle to deliver contaminants of mining wastes as containment structures fail in future years. It is a set up for perpetual if not immediate disaster. The nightmare of "dead zones" and "sacrificial area" is but a vote away. Virginians are largely unaware of the environmental implications associated with uranium mining. The bulk of information presented by the media has been paid for by VUI (Virginia Uranium Incorporated). We need to change that.

We are asking for your help in this grass roots effort to keep the ban on mining Virginia intact.
We are asking you to spread the word, to call your state representatives and implore them to "keep the ban".
We are asking you to write letters to the editor stating your concerns.
-call and write your representatives
-lobby them
-Bring the message to church, business,schools
-Visit your town council, board of supervisors, etc. Ask for and expect a resolution condemning the mining of Virginia
-Organize a local chapter to stand united.
-Do what you can to bring this subject out of the closet and fully exposed as the pestilent folly for which it is.

The mining proponents are hoping that we will apathetically sleep through this corporate rollover. But we are waking up. We realize the value of our water and air. We feel the potential and power within ourselves to stand firm and protect this land as inheritors of a sacred place. A victory in " keeping the ban" will bolster our efforts on every environmental front. The unity we will achieve will strengthen all of our environmental efforts to keep Virginia clean and its citizens healthy.

Thank You
Friend of the Keep the Ban

I include here links pertaining to this issue:
http://keeptheban.org/
http://keeptheban.org/?page_id=237
 (Please note that there is a statewide petition which you can sign online at this site.)

The Endangered Roanoke River Needs Your Help!
https://secure3.convio.net/citnet/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=603
Informative Blogs:

http://www.pecva.org/anx/index.cfm/1,391,0,44,html/Uranium
http://www.southernenvironment.org/virginia/uranium_mining_in_virginia/
http://lifeincva.blogspot.com/
http://uraniumfreevirginia.blogspot.com/
http://virginiaagainsturanium.blogspot.com/
http://prideva.blogspot.com/
http://wise-uranium.org/
http://dls.state.va.us/groups/cec/Uranium/meetings.htm
http://danvilleregionalfoundation.org/news/2010/20100618-UraniumStudyProposals.php
http://www2.godanriver.com/news/2010/apr/01/virginia_beach_outlines_uranium_concerns-ar-270571/

http://www.earthworksaction.org/pubs/ComparisonsReportFinal.pdf
Comparison of Predicted and Actual Water Quality at Hardrock Mines

http://204.12.38.203/archives/34/lewis.pdf
Keeping Agriculture Alive in the Shadow of a Uranium Mine: Potential Effects and Regulatory Solutions for Virginia

THE TRINITY TEST: "Hanford nuclear reservation - the largest contaminated area in the world!"

FOR THOSE who grew up after World War II, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was an indelible part of the era. I and my classmates practiced kneeling by school lockers with our coats over our heads to protect us from flying glass, laughing at the absurdity. We watched first-aid films in health class showing bodies strewn in radioactive rubble. There was a fallout shelter in my junior-high basement, and another in the basement of The Seattle Times.

THE FIRST PLUTONIUM to leave the Hanford nuclear reservation was a nitrate syrup sealed in a heavy stainless-steel container and carried in the back seat of a sedan along the Columbia River to a train in Portland. As shipments increased, the Manhattan Project switched to more formal military escort.

The bomb's development was incredibly rapid, and no state was more intimately involved than Washington.

Shortly before World War II began, German physicists discovered that atoms could be split, or fissioned, resulting in the release of huge amounts of energy. The news electrified physicists around the world. By 1940, researchers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan were working on the problem of sustaining a chain reaction for a possible weapon.

Japan did not have the uranium to make a bomb, but its investigation of the possibility of building one did not end until physicist Yoshio Nishina's laboratory was firebombed by U.S. planes on April 12, 1945.

Not only did physicists almost immediately recognize the military potential of nuclear fission, but they also began in 1942 the theoretical work on a hydrogen bomb based on the fusion of hydrogen into helium, which powers the sun and stars. The H-bomb would have the power of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Because of its technical difficulty, it was 10 more years before that new escalation in destructive power was tested.

Since the United States had the world's biggest economy and was remote from the actual battlefields, only America had the ability to sustain an atom-bomb project during World War II. Germany never vigorously pursued the project, and top Nazis remained relatively ignorant of the bomb's potential. When physicist Werner Heisenberg held a briefing for Hitler's leadership in 1942, a secretary sent the wrong agenda and as a result key leaders didn't bother to show up.

American scientists, in contrast, convinced political leaders of the incredible latent nuclear power in matter. But even with Einstein lending his prestige by signing a letter to Roosevelt warning of the military implications of nuclear energy, the project languished until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

That it subsequently succeeded is one of the most amazing science and technology stories in history. Making the necessary bomb fuel was enormously difficult.

The most common radioactive element in nature is uranium-238, making up about 99 percent of the earth's supply of uranium. Because U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years - about as old as Earth - only half of what was present when Earth was formed has decayed away. That is why the planet still has so many uranium deposits and the United States could open 400 mines during the Cold War and extract 60 million tons of ore for weapons alone.

Uranium-238 does not sustain a fission chain reaction, however, and must be modified into an isotope that can. U-238 fuel can be bombarded in a nuclear reactor to make U-235, the fuel for the Hiroshima bomb.

That isotope was made and separated at labs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II.

There was an alternative. In 1941, a University of California chemist named Glenn Seaborg created an element with an even bigger potential for explosive power. Since the previously discovered uranium had taken its name from Uranus and neptunium from Neptune, Seaborg named his discovery plutonium: after the planet Pluto and, coincidentally, the Greek god of the dead.

Not knowing which fuel could be successfully manufactured or fabricated into a bomb, the United States decided to pursue both. While Oak Ridge would make U-235, a secret complex near the remote Eastern Washington hamlet of Hanford would make plutonium.

Fuel rods of uranium were irradiated in Hanford reactors to make about a dime-sized button of plutonium for every two tons of fuel. The elusive substance then had to be recovered by dissolving the fuel rods in acid and isolating the plutonium in a complex, messy series of steps.

Read more:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/trinity/articles/part1.html

Groups: Foreign Companies, Workers are Big Early Winners Under Federal Loan Guarantees for Nuclear Reactors

Comment:  Demand our leaders to stop giving taxpayer's monies away to any companies but we really do not want any form of Nuke Plants paid for by taxpayers and we will fight to stop our taxpayer's monies going to France or Japan Nukes!  No to Nukes!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 1, 2010

Groups: Foreign Companies, Workers are Big Early Winners Under Federal Loan Guarantees for Nuclear Reactors

WASHINGTON, D.C. — July 1, 2010 — The notion that taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for more nuclear power means energy independence in the United States is a hoax that could cost unwary U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars while richly benefiting profitable foreign corporations and non-U.S. workers, according to a new report from the nonprofit Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS).

Titled Nuclear Power: Implications of Loan Guarantees for Reactors With Foreign Control and Foreign Jobs, the NIRS report notes that:

•Two of the next three reactors in line for taxpayer-backed loan guarantee bailouts — Calvert Cliffs Unit 3 in Maryland and South Texas Project Units 3 and 4 in Texas — have substantial foreign ownership involving French and Japanese companies.
•One of the two already awarded taxpayer-backed nuclear loan guarantees — for a uranium enrichment facility in Idaho — is a project of the French company AREVA.

•All 18 currently pending reactor projects in the U.S. feature reactors that are designed by French and Japanese companies. Nearly all of the immediate employment benefits of the loan guarantees will flow to non-U.S. workers, since virtually all major reactor components are made outside of the United States by foreign companies.
Additionally, of $18.5 billion currently authorized for nuclear loan guarantees, the Department of Energy (DOE) has given out $8.3 billion, leaving $10.2 billion, which DOE says is only enough for one project.

The Obama administration has stuck $9 billion in additional loan guarantee authority in the House version of the war supplemental, which the House may vote on by the end of this week. This means the bill to fund U.S. war efforts may be used to subsidize foreign-controlled nuclear reactor projects and related overseas employment.

Michael Mariotte, executive director, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said: "Nuclear power is U.S.-made power only in the same way that a shirt made in China is 'American' because you buy it at a Wal-Mart in this country.

The bailout of the nuclear industry with taxpayer-backed financing of loan guarantees is in no way a triumph for U.S. energy independence.

Instead, it is a huge publicly backed corporate welfare arrangement for foreign-owned companies and non-U.S. workers.

The non-U.S. companies that stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer-backed loan guarantees are both massive in size and profitable.

If American taxpayers were upset about bailing out U.S. banks and car companies, they should be furious about being put at risk in order to fatten the bottom line of overseas nuclear companies."


A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NEXT LOAN GUARANTEE CANDIDATES

In February 2010, President Obama announced that the first federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors would be offered to the Vogtle Units 3 and 4 that the Southern Company is planning to build in Georgia. The company announced on June 18, 2010, that it had reached agreement with the Department of Energy on the secret terms of the guarantees. The Vogtle units are slated to use reactors supplied by Westinghouse Electric, a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba Corp.

In May 2010, the Energy Department announced a $2 billion loan guarantee for a uranium enrichment facility in Idaho proposed by the French company AREVA.

DOE has not formally announced which other reactor projects might be granted loan guarantees, but the signs are that they would be the following:

•UniStar Nuclear's Calvert Cliffs project;
•Nuclear Innovation North America's South Texas project; and
•SCANA Corporation's Virgil C. Summer project.

The operators of both Calvert Cliffs and South Texas include substantially foreign-controlled ownership, while the operator of the V.C. Summer project is a U.S. company. Calvert Cliffs is slated to use a reactor supplied by France's AREVA, South Texas will be supplied by Japan's Toshiba, and V.C. Summer will be supplied by the Westinghouse Electric unit of Toshiba.

For the full text of the NIRS report, go to http://www.nirs.org/
Read more:
http://www.nirs.org/press/07-01-2010/2

Mothers for Peace takes NRC back to federal court for flaunting federal laws

Comment:  The NRC is so secretive and loves to protect the nukes!  No to Nuke Power!
February 11, 2009

MOTHERS FOR PEACE TAKES NRC BACK TO FEDERAL COURT FOR FLAUNTING FEDERAL LAWS

The San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace (MFP) on February 9, 2009 filed an Initial Brief with the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. Attorney Diane Curran accuses the NRC of illegal secrecy and of refusing to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Atomic Energy Act (AEA).

MFP asserts that, in approving a license for the Diablo Canyon Spent Fuel Storage Installation (“ISFSI” or dry cask storage facility), the NRC should have granted MFP a closed hearing on the adequacy of the NRC’s Environmental Assessment (EA), which was a mere eight pages in length. The NRC claimed that security considerations ruled out a hearing, even though at a closed hearing only those with the required security clearance would be present. MFP attorney Diane Curran has the necessary clearance.

MFP also accuses the NRC of unlawfully using secret criteria to deny the possible environmental impacts of an attack on the dry casks at Diablo Canyon.

The NRC illegally ruled that there was no requirement to do a complete Environmental Impact Statement, claiming irrationally that even a successful terrorist attack would have “no significant impact” on the environment.

The NRC violated both NEPA and a June, 2006 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court in favor of MFP when the regulators excluded from consideration credible attack scenarios on the dry casks at Diablo Canyon that could have devastating environmental impacts. Under NEPA, environmental impacts that are “reasonably foreseeable” and have “catastrophic consequences, even if their probability of occurrence is low” must be taken into account.

According to MFP spokesperson Jane Swanson, "Mothers for Peace has been a vigilant advocate for safety and environmental protection at Diablo Canyon for over three decades. We do not accept the NRC's view that the only group it must consult about how to address the impacts of an attack on the Diablo Canyon facility is Pacific Gas and Electric Company. As neighbors of the plant who would be severely impacted by a successful attack, we are entitled to be part of the decision-making process."

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT The following is the complete wording of pages 29 - 32 of the Initial Brief, which has a total length of 95 pages. The more detailed legal arguments are on pages 33 – 55. The complete brief will soon be accessible on the NRC website and at mothersforpeace.org.

In San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, this Court [the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals] overturned an NRC decision which refused, as a matter of law, to consider the environmental impacts of attacks in its licensing decisions for proposed nuclear facilities. On remand, the NRC prepared a supplemental EA for the Diablo Canyon ISFSI that purported to consider all “plausible” attacks on the facility, yet reached the patently absurd conclusion that the environmental effects of an attack on the facility would be negligible. The EA Supplement gave no indication that the NRC had addressed credible attack scenarios involving penetration of a storage module and ignition of a fire in the spent fuel, leading to the airborne release of a large quantity of radioactive cesium, widespread land contamination, and potentially devastating environmental and health effects.

No longer able to claim that an environmental analysis of attack impacts was not legally required, the Commission now attempted to erect an impregnable legal barrier to any criticisms of its decision not to prepare an EIS regarding the environmental impacts of an attack on the Diablo Canyon ISFSI: the Commission refused to admit for a hearing any contentions that questioned whether it had given adequate consideration to attack scenarios that could cause significant adverse environmental impacts, on the ground that to admit such a contention would require the NRC to unlawfully disclose to SLOMFP sensitive security information protected by federal law.

While federal law does prohibit unrestricted public disclosure of sensitive security information, however, it contains no prohibition against the disclosure of sensitive security information to interested parties in a closed and protected hearing. The NRC had a statutory obligation, under NEPA, to fully consider environmental issues in its decision-making process by granting SLOMFP the closed hearing to which it was entitled under the AEA.

BACKGROUND The precedent-setting case began in 2002, when the NRC refused to evaluate the environmental impacts of an attack on the proposed dry cask facility before issuing a permit to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) to store spent fuel on the site. In 2006, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the NRC to do such a study in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In response, the NRC Staff produced an extremely abbreviated 8-page environmental assessment that claimed the impacts of a successful attack would be “insignificant”. MFP's expert witness, Dr. Gordon Thompson of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, contended that the agency’s technical analysts erred by assuming a cask could be punctured without also recognizing that its contents could be ignited, allowing a large quantity of radioactive cesium and other contaminants to become airborne and transported over a broad geographic area. The resulting damage to public health and the environment would cost billions of dollars.

Read more:
http://mothersforpeace.org/20090211nrc

Uranium leak No 2 in France

Comment:  The French has our VA leaders ear and telling the false truths about how Great France is with Nuke Power and Uranium Mining, well not true!

18/07/08 11:56 CET

France is investigating its second low-level radioactive leak in ten days, this time at a plant in Romans-sur-Isere in the south east of the country.

The plant, which processes uranium products for power stations and research reactors, is operated by a subsidiary of Areva, the French nuclear giant in charge of the site of the first leak.

The French environment minister Jean-Louis Borloo said: “I want transparent information on the water-tables.

Read more:
http://www.euronews.net/2008/07/18/uranium-leak-no-2-in-france/

Declare your independence" from risky nuclear loan guarantees before the 4th of July!

Comment:  No to nuke monies from the Federal government paid for by taxpayers, No to the Climate Bill, full of taxpayer's monies for nukes!


Declare your independence" from risky nuclear loan guarantees before the 4th of July!

There is still time to act against expanded nuclear power loan guarantees before the U.S. House finalizes its supplemental war funding and disaster relief bill by its Independence Day recess.

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee, chaired by Dave Obey (Democrat-Wisconsin), is considering an emergency supplemental war funding and disaster relief bill. The Obama administration has pushed for $9 billion in additional nuclear power loan guarantees to be attached as a rider onto this bill, thus attempting to rush part of a $36 billion expansion request to the nuclear power loan guarantee program, originally requested for next year's Fiscal Year 2011 budget, onto this fiscal year's budget.

Given that the $8.33 billion in atomic power loan guarantees granted by the U.S. Dept. of Energy for two new reactors at Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, announced by President Obama himself last February (and just accepted by Southern Company), would come from the U.S. Federal Financing Bank, this program appears poised to extract not only loan guarantees from taxpayers, but even the loans themselves. Wall Street investment firms are still too burned by atomic defaults from the 1970s and 1980s -- the largest managerial disaster in business history according to Forbes magazine -- to risk their own funds on new reactors, despite the federal loan guarantees!

Ironically, the House will try to pass this supplemental appropriations bill before it leaves for the 4th of July Independence Day recess. There is even the possibility that the U.S. House Appropriations Committee will be bypassed, and the bill will go directly to the House floor for passage. Such short cuts make a mockery of due process -- consideration by the committee of jurisdiction. As the U.S. Declaration of Independence says, when government becomes inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right and duty of citizens to alter or abolish government. Thus, it's high time for taxpayers to declare their independence from the nuclear relapse, and just say no to risky atomic loan guarantees!

As Taxpayers for Common Sense argues, such an emergency supplemental war funding and disaster relief bill is no place for energy loan guarantees to be attached in the first place. But then again, the entire $54.5 billion in nuclear power loan guarantees that the Obama administration has requested is a risk to taxpayers that should be blocked, no matter what piece of legislation it is attached to.

Act now! Call your U.S. Representative via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121: urge them to weigh in with their House colleagues on the Appropriations Committee, especially Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-WI), to block expanded nuclear power loan guarantees; urge that they vote against any bill that includes atomic loan guarantees.

9 US Congress Members oppose $9 billion nuclear loan guarantee expansion in emergency war funding bill


Nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives -- Donna Edwards (D-MD), Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), John Hall (D-NY), Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and Peter Welch (D-VT) -- sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-WI) on June 22nd, expressing opposition to the inclusion of $9 billion in expanded federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power reactors.

The provision is attached as a rider to an emergency war funding bill, which the Members regard as improper.

Please consider calling one or more of the signatories via the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to thank them for their good action to protect taxpayer pocketbooks from nuclear power's financial risks.

The House Appropriations Committee may act on this issue by the beginning of its Independence Day recess which begins July 3rd, so phone your own U.S. Representative via the Switchboard number above as well, to urge them to express similar opposition to expanded nuclear power loan guarantees to Chairman Obey and other Members of the House Appropriations Committee.

Obama's post-Gulf oil catastrophe call for "clean energy" tacit push for taxpayer-backed atomic expansion


Although President Barack Obama did not say the words "nuclear power" in his first ever Oval Office address to the nation on June 15th, his call for an accelerated "transition to clean energy" in response to the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history -- the worsening oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico -- represents a tacit push for the expansion of atomic energy.

This would only take place by transferring the financial risks and even direct costs (not to mention the radiological risks) squarely on the backs of taxpayers.

 Obama said "Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses."

He failed to mention that the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate-energy bill would carve out up to 30% of federal "Clean Energy Deployment Administration" funding and support -- loan guarantees, outright loans, and other subsidies -- for new atomic reactors and other nuclear facilities such as uranium enrichment plants.

Obama also failed to mention that the Kerry-Lieberman "climate" bill in the Senate -- more of a dirty energy subsidy bill, including, ironically, support for expanded offshore oil drilling -- contains a long list of taxpayer giveaways to the nuclear power industry, as revealed in analyses by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill would include the $36 billion expansion of the nuclear loan guarantee program funding requested from Congress by Energy Secretary Chu for the Fiscal Year 2011 budget, $9 billion of which the Obama administration is trying to rush onto the Fiscal Year 2010 budget by attaching a rider onto the emergency supplemental war funding and disaster relief bill currently before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee.

Also not mentioned in Obama's speech was the Bingaman energy bill, passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last summer: its version of the federal "Clean Energy Deployment Administration" is significantly worse than the House version, allowing for unlimited loan guarantees for nuclear power, without congressional oversight -- granting the Department of Energy veritable blank check writing authority for the nuclear relapse.

Contact the White House comment line at (202) 456-1111, or fill out its web form at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact ; urge President Obama to stop seeking to expand atomic energy at taxpayer risk and expense.

Read more:
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/nuclear-costs-whatsnew/2010/6/17/declare-your-independence-from-risky-nuclear-loan-guarantees.html