The Administration Puts Its Own Stamp on a Possible Nuclear Revival
February 2, 2010
By
> PETER BEHR of ClimateWire
> http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/02/02climatewire-the-administrati
> on-put
> s-its-own-stamp-on-a-p-76078.html
>
> The Obama administration's 2011 budget proposal gives its distinctive
> endorsement to a revival of American nuclear power.
>
> "We are working hard to restart the American nuclear power industry,"
> Energy Secretary Steven Chu said yesterday, calling it a key part of
> the nation's response to the climate threat.
>
> As reported last week, the administration wants to triple the size of
> the Energy Department's loan guarantee program to $54 billion, which
> could support the construction of seven to 10 new reactors, Chu said,
> if their designs are approved and the developers raise their share of
> the capital.
> The first two conditional loan guarantee awards should be made soon,
> the department says.
>
> The loan guarantee projects should demonstrate whether new reactors
> can be built on time and on budget, Chu said. After that, the industry
> should be able to expand without major federal support, he added
> yesterday. That position promises to provoke debate with the nuclear
> industry and congressional supporters, who are seeking long-running
> federal support for new reactors.
>
> The 2011 budget also denies funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain
> nuclear waste repository in Nevada, and Chu said the administration
> will withdraw the facility's license application at the Nuclear
> Regulatory Commission over the next month.
>
> The Yucca Mountain decision formalizes the position that President
> Obama took in the 2008 presidential campaign for Nevada's primary. It
> means that a growing volume of used reactor fuel assemblies will have
> to be stored for decades at some 60 reactor sites, as they are now,
> until new nuclear fuel cycle technologies and policies are developed
> that can win Congress'
> support.
>
> It also means that the federal government will pile up continuing
> heavy financial obligations to nuclear plant operators, since the
> government will remain in violation of its legal requirement to take
> spent fuel off the operators' hands, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste
> Policy Act.
>
> Blue Ribbon Commission will not pick waste sites
>
> The Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste policy, which Chu named
> last week, will not take up the politically charged question of where
> spent fuel ultimately might be stored, the secretary said. "It is not
> a siting commission," he said. Yucca Mountain is the only permanent
> storage option approved by Congress.
>
> Chu noted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved long-
> term, on-site fuel storage in water pools or in "dry cask" containers
> as a safe alternative to permanent central storage in a repository.
> "NRC has stipulated that the waste in dry cask storage will be safe
> for half a century, so that means there's time to take a deep breath
> -- and we know a lot more than we did in 1982 -- to really look at
> this dispassionately," Chu said.
>
> Spent fuel assemblies are stored initially in water pools at the
> reactor sites for at least five years as the heat from nuclear
> reactions begins to dissipate. After that, assemblies can be placed in
> a closed cylinder, which is enclosed in an outer cask of metal or
> concrete, and kept at reactor sites.
>
> Jim Warren, executive director of NC Warn, is part of a group of
> activists who have pressed the NRC to order utilities to move much
> more of the spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage and tighten
> security over spent fuel storage in other ways.
>
> "It should be one of the top priorities for the commission, if not the
> top priority," Warren said. "It is a clear and present danger at more
> than 60 [reactor] facilities around the country. The potential for an
> accident in a pool is very, very low, but the probability of some act
> of malice is impossible to calculate."
>
> The administration had been vetting names for the Blue Ribbon
> Commission for months, but it moved quickly last week to announce the
> 15 commission members in advance of the 2011 budget's release with
> action on the Yucca Mountain site.
>
> Search for a way to shrink wastes
>
> The commission is chaired by Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic House
> member from Indiana who is president of the Woodrow Wilson
> International Center for Scholars in Washington and was vice chairman
> of the 9/11 Commission, and Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser
> to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.
>
> Chu declined yesterday to spell out the commission's charter.
>
> "I'm not going to prejudge what the commission is going to look at,"
> he
> said. In earlier interviews, Chu and Deputy Energy Secretary Dan
> Poneman described the commission's task as a wide-ranging review of
> new reactor technologies that could achieve a more complete "burn" of
> nuclear fuel, reducing the physical volume and high-level radioactive
> toxicity of the spent fuel assemblies, as well as investigating fuel
> cycle approaches that could reduce the risk of nuclear weapons
> proliferation.
>
> "I would expect this Blue Ribbon Commission to take a broad look at
> how the pieces fit together and really look at it from all
> dimensions,"
> Poneman said
> last month.
>
> Some experts close to the issue say the commission faces a difficult
> dichotomy in choosing its long- and short-term policy targets.
>
> On the one hand, Chu and senior DOE officials say there is plenty of
> time to develop new reprocessing or recycling strategies from an
> economic or a spent fuel storage perspective. A comprehensive nuclear
> fuel cycle study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, due to
> be released in several months, will make the same point, participants
> say.
>
> Charles Ferguson of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed, in
> testimony to a congressional committee last June. "Time is on the side
> of the United States," he said. "There is no need to rush toward
> development and deployment of recycling of spent nuclear fuel."
> Currently, those approaches are far more expensive than the
> "once-through" fuel cycle approach in the United States, assuming
> mined uranium prices do not escalate.
>
> Big questions about proliferation on the table
>
> Nuclear power currently provides 20 percent of the nation's
> electricity, constituting by far the largest source of power without
> greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the key technology questions about
> possible new fuel cycles cannot be rushed, said Charles Forsberg,
> executive director of the MIT study. The effects of radiation on
> potential new fuel container materials must be studied over time, for
> example.
>
> On the other hand, the 30-year-old U.S. policy position against
> reprocessing has not worked, other experts say, and on this front,
> time may be running out. Forsberg noted in a 2008 report that 33
> countries have nuclear reactors and 40 countries are interested in
> constructing them. The commission may have to consider how much time
> and leverage the United States has to create new international
> non-proliferation agreements. Can the United States lead international
> efforts to keep countries with small nuclear programs from
> reprocessing, or promote reprocessing methods that are less risky?
>
> These and many other questions should be on the table, Forsberg said.
> "What it comes down to is that people haven't looked at the fuel cycle
> for 30 years in the United States. There are lots of options, but it's
> too early to know which ones are going to be winners."
>
> It is possible that some fuel cycle approaches could increase eventual
> public acceptance of permanent nuclear waste storage, Forsberg said,
> and this is an important area for study, too.
>
> "There are no silver bullets in this game. Virtually all fuel cycles
> require some kind of repository. The size, scope and characteristics
> may vary, but there are long-lived components that you can't burn out.
> Bottom line, you have to build a repository," Forsberg said.
>
> "The administration is right in recognizing that the Yucca Mountain
> Project represents a failed approach to the disposal of high level
> nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel -- the third such failure in the
> past 50 years,"
> said Tom
> Cochran, senior scientist for the nuclear program of the Natural
> Resources Defense Council, in a statement last week.
>
> "To avoid the mistakes of the past, the Blue Ribbon Commission will
> need to identify more effective, open and transparent processes for
> selecting new candidate geological repository sites and licensing
> criteria that protect the health and the environment of future
> generations," Cochran said.
>
> Chu expressed his hopes yesterday that the commission can succeed.
> "I deeply
> believe that the waste material, the spent fuel materials, these are
> solvable problems. They are solvable scientifically. And quite frankly
> -- call me wildly optimistic -- I think they're solvable politically."
>
>
By
> PETER BEHR of ClimateWire
> http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/02/02climatewire-the-administrati
> on-put
> s-its-own-stamp-on-a-p-76078.html
>
> The Obama administration's 2011 budget proposal gives its distinctive
> endorsement to a revival of American nuclear power.
>
> "We are working hard to restart the American nuclear power industry,"
> Energy Secretary Steven Chu said yesterday, calling it a key part of
> the nation's response to the climate threat.
>
> As reported last week, the administration wants to triple the size of
> the Energy Department's loan guarantee program to $54 billion, which
> could support the construction of seven to 10 new reactors, Chu said,
> if their designs are approved and the developers raise their share of
> the capital.
> The first two conditional loan guarantee awards should be made soon,
> the department says.
>
> The loan guarantee projects should demonstrate whether new reactors
> can be built on time and on budget, Chu said. After that, the industry
> should be able to expand without major federal support, he added
> yesterday. That position promises to provoke debate with the nuclear
> industry and congressional supporters, who are seeking long-running
> federal support for new reactors.
>
> The 2011 budget also denies funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain
> nuclear waste repository in Nevada, and Chu said the administration
> will withdraw the facility's license application at the Nuclear
> Regulatory Commission over the next month.
>
> The Yucca Mountain decision formalizes the position that President
> Obama took in the 2008 presidential campaign for Nevada's primary. It
> means that a growing volume of used reactor fuel assemblies will have
> to be stored for decades at some 60 reactor sites, as they are now,
> until new nuclear fuel cycle technologies and policies are developed
> that can win Congress'
> support.
>
> It also means that the federal government will pile up continuing
> heavy financial obligations to nuclear plant operators, since the
> government will remain in violation of its legal requirement to take
> spent fuel off the operators' hands, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste
> Policy Act.
>
> Blue Ribbon Commission will not pick waste sites
>
> The Blue Ribbon Commission on nuclear waste policy, which Chu named
> last week, will not take up the politically charged question of where
> spent fuel ultimately might be stored, the secretary said. "It is not
> a siting commission," he said. Yucca Mountain is the only permanent
> storage option approved by Congress.
>
> Chu noted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved long-
> term, on-site fuel storage in water pools or in "dry cask" containers
> as a safe alternative to permanent central storage in a repository.
> "NRC has stipulated that the waste in dry cask storage will be safe
> for half a century, so that means there's time to take a deep breath
> -- and we know a lot more than we did in 1982 -- to really look at
> this dispassionately," Chu said.
>
> Spent fuel assemblies are stored initially in water pools at the
> reactor sites for at least five years as the heat from nuclear
> reactions begins to dissipate. After that, assemblies can be placed in
> a closed cylinder, which is enclosed in an outer cask of metal or
> concrete, and kept at reactor sites.
>
> Jim Warren, executive director of NC Warn, is part of a group of
> activists who have pressed the NRC to order utilities to move much
> more of the spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage and tighten
> security over spent fuel storage in other ways.
>
> "It should be one of the top priorities for the commission, if not the
> top priority," Warren said. "It is a clear and present danger at more
> than 60 [reactor] facilities around the country. The potential for an
> accident in a pool is very, very low, but the probability of some act
> of malice is impossible to calculate."
>
> The administration had been vetting names for the Blue Ribbon
> Commission for months, but it moved quickly last week to announce the
> 15 commission members in advance of the 2011 budget's release with
> action on the Yucca Mountain site.
>
> Search for a way to shrink wastes
>
> The commission is chaired by Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic House
> member from Indiana who is president of the Woodrow Wilson
> International Center for Scholars in Washington and was vice chairman
> of the 9/11 Commission, and Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser
> to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.
>
> Chu declined yesterday to spell out the commission's charter.
>
> "I'm not going to prejudge what the commission is going to look at,"
> he
> said. In earlier interviews, Chu and Deputy Energy Secretary Dan
> Poneman described the commission's task as a wide-ranging review of
> new reactor technologies that could achieve a more complete "burn" of
> nuclear fuel, reducing the physical volume and high-level radioactive
> toxicity of the spent fuel assemblies, as well as investigating fuel
> cycle approaches that could reduce the risk of nuclear weapons
> proliferation.
>
> "I would expect this Blue Ribbon Commission to take a broad look at
> how the pieces fit together and really look at it from all
> dimensions,"
> Poneman said
> last month.
>
> Some experts close to the issue say the commission faces a difficult
> dichotomy in choosing its long- and short-term policy targets.
>
> On the one hand, Chu and senior DOE officials say there is plenty of
> time to develop new reprocessing or recycling strategies from an
> economic or a spent fuel storage perspective. A comprehensive nuclear
> fuel cycle study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, due to
> be released in several months, will make the same point, participants
> say.
>
> Charles Ferguson of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed, in
> testimony to a congressional committee last June. "Time is on the side
> of the United States," he said. "There is no need to rush toward
> development and deployment of recycling of spent nuclear fuel."
> Currently, those approaches are far more expensive than the
> "once-through" fuel cycle approach in the United States, assuming
> mined uranium prices do not escalate.
>
> Big questions about proliferation on the table
>
> Nuclear power currently provides 20 percent of the nation's
> electricity, constituting by far the largest source of power without
> greenhouse gas emissions. Some of the key technology questions about
> possible new fuel cycles cannot be rushed, said Charles Forsberg,
> executive director of the MIT study. The effects of radiation on
> potential new fuel container materials must be studied over time, for
> example.
>
> On the other hand, the 30-year-old U.S. policy position against
> reprocessing has not worked, other experts say, and on this front,
> time may be running out. Forsberg noted in a 2008 report that 33
> countries have nuclear reactors and 40 countries are interested in
> constructing them. The commission may have to consider how much time
> and leverage the United States has to create new international
> non-proliferation agreements. Can the United States lead international
> efforts to keep countries with small nuclear programs from
> reprocessing, or promote reprocessing methods that are less risky?
>
> These and many other questions should be on the table, Forsberg said.
> "What it comes down to is that people haven't looked at the fuel cycle
> for 30 years in the United States. There are lots of options, but it's
> too early to know which ones are going to be winners."
>
> It is possible that some fuel cycle approaches could increase eventual
> public acceptance of permanent nuclear waste storage, Forsberg said,
> and this is an important area for study, too.
>
> "There are no silver bullets in this game. Virtually all fuel cycles
> require some kind of repository. The size, scope and characteristics
> may vary, but there are long-lived components that you can't burn out.
> Bottom line, you have to build a repository," Forsberg said.
>
> "The administration is right in recognizing that the Yucca Mountain
> Project represents a failed approach to the disposal of high level
> nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel -- the third such failure in the
> past 50 years,"
> said Tom
> Cochran, senior scientist for the nuclear program of the Natural
> Resources Defense Council, in a statement last week.
>
> "To avoid the mistakes of the past, the Blue Ribbon Commission will
> need to identify more effective, open and transparent processes for
> selecting new candidate geological repository sites and licensing
> criteria that protect the health and the environment of future
> generations," Cochran said.
>
> Chu expressed his hopes yesterday that the commission can succeed.
> "I deeply
> believe that the waste material, the spent fuel materials, these are
> solvable problems. They are solvable scientifically. And quite frankly
> -- call me wildly optimistic -- I think they're solvable politically."
>
>