Just another reason why uranium isn’t the way to go, it costs the taxpayer way too much money for what he receives.

Take the former Fernald Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, Ohio, that’s about 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati.  The former uranium processing site opened in complete secrecy during the Cold War in 1951.  The plant fabricated uranium fuel cores for the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex until 1989, when it shut the doors.

Releases from the plant exposed residents of the small community of Fernald to radon, soluble and insoluble forms of uranium and various chemicals, both in groundwater and from blowing dust.  The health consequences to residents and former workers are still being evaluated.

True, the Cold War was settled peacefully, with jangled nerves and a plethora of nuclear weapons as a threat to total annihilation of anyone who attacks our shores.  But the taxpayers who worked at and lived near the plant were exposed to dangerous elements, as described above.  Some payoff, especially for the 50 years it took to get the mess cleaned up.

How much did it cost, you ask?  Well, the Energy Department has finished the removal of 1.5 million tons of waste at a cost of $4.4 billion.  And, after 22 years, remember that number, 22 years, the feds have agreed to pay $13.7 million settlement over contaminated ground water at the site.

True, this isn’t about a nuclear power generating station, it’s about nuclear energy and the stuff that makes it run, uranium.  Once disturbed from it’s natural state, entered into the mainstream of American life, it can be dangerous at best.

Don’t forget, this is only one of maybe a hundred or more sites where mighty uranium has been mined, processed, fabricated or used in some way that has yet to be cleaned up and restored.  Nuclear isn’t clean, it’s dirty, invasive and dangerous, but we’ve got it and there’s no way to change it.

Posts Related to Uranium and Nuclear

• Texas Going Nuclear to Fight Climate Change?
• What Do You Do About the Waste?  Recycle and Reuse.
• 75% of Greens OK with Nuclear Power
• Green Options Environmental Discussion Forum - Nuclear Energy, Good or Bad?

Image:   www.lm.doe.gov/…/ fernald_orig/Future/flu.htm

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I am a bit reluctant to call this plant a “first”, but I can get just as excited about the third, 10th or 100th plant in a progressive series of improved plants that should number 1000 reactors or more.

The plant, designated as HTR-PM, will be a 200 MWe pebble bed reactor heated steam plant with two reactors, each with a single steam generator (boiler) feeding a single turbine. The plant will be built in Rongchen City on a site large enough to host series of perhaps 10-12 similar plants. In that area of China, there are hundreds of older coal fired power plants generating 50-300 MWe each.

The HTR-PM is a carefully watched project that uses technology old enough to be new again. The concept was introduced in the late 1940s by Farrington Daniels who suggested the idea of combining uranium with graphite, which is a high temperature substance that also moderates neutrons, into small, discrete units that could be piled into a simple, shielded container.

This concept, known as the Daniels’ Pile, was a bit before its time. The material science available in the late 1940s could not provide the tight, vapor-proof coatings needed to ensure that all fission by-products remained sealed in the pebbles in all core conditions. That problem was addressed and overcome by the German project known as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR) run in Julich from 1959-1988.

The AVR started operating in 1961, provided power to the grid in 1967 and was shut down after many years of testing and fuel developmental improvements in 1988.

The first commercial high temperature reactors

The AVR did not operate in isolation; during the same time there was a high temperature gas cooled reactor, built by Gulf General Atomics (now just General Atomics) and operated in the US at Fort St. Vrain. That HTGR was based on fuel in a different form, but it used fuel particles surrounded by layers of graphite and silicon carbide to provide the capability of operating at a significantly higher temperature and thermal efficiency than the conventional light water reactors.

I had the opportunity to visit General Atomics in 1994, before they decommissioned the fuel manufacturing facility that produced the Ft. St. Vrain fuel, and they gave me the pebble that you see here as a keep sake. It has been on my desk ever since.

The German group operating the AVR also built a commercial unit - Thorium High Temperature Reactor (THTR) - using fuel pebbles where some pebbles contained uranium-235 and others contained thorium-232. This fuel combination intrigued the designers because thorium is about 3-4 times as abundant as uranium, but it needs to be exposed to neutrons in a reactor before it can be used as fuel.

Unfortunately, though they were both commercial reactors, neither the Ft. St. Vrain HTGR nor the THTR operated for very long and neither led to any immediate successors. Good ideas, however, often incubate in the minds of problem solvers that see all of the potential and determine ways to solve the problems for another try.

China’s New High Temperature Reactors (HTR)

In 2000, the AVR rose up like a Phoenix in a new location at Tsinghua University with a new name - HTR-10. The Chinese had recognized the potential of the design and purchased essentially all of the makings including technical drawings, machinery, and consulting engineering services from the German owners. In January 2003, the HTR-10 began critical operations and testing. I have a number of friends and colleagues who have visited the facility and have been impressed. You can have a similar experience by watching a video produced by the Australian Broadcasting System titled Nuclear China.

There are many things about pebble bed reactors that fascinate me, but one of them is the fact that they can be configured to be able to withstand a complete loss of cooling without causing any core damage. As long as each reactor unit produces less than 400 MW of thermal energy, operators can turn off the cooling circulators and walk away knowing that the plant will heat up a bit, shut itself down, and never exceed a temperature at which any fuel damage will occur. Now that is a hot idea whose time has come!

The HTR-PM is capable of providing very high quality steam, identical to the steam produced in the most efficient coal fired power plants. In fact, Jim Holm has suggested that we could short cut the lengthy nuclear plant construction process by replacing boilers in existing steam plants with high temperature pebble beds.

It is one hell of a way to help solve the world’s most pressing energy challenge - how do we replace the low cost heat that coal provides to enable our modern economy without creating emissions that may overheat our planet?

Photo credits HTR-10 Schematic and simulated pebble fuel element from Rod Adams archives under creative commons.

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For a lot of years, I’ve respected and admired Arizona Senator John McCain, and even though he is a Republican, he seemed to be more moderate than his right-wing compatriots.

That changed today when I read that he has proposed construction of 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030.  Adding insult to injury, he told a Missouri State University audience that he’d pledge $2 billion a year in federal funds to make clean coal a reality.  All in the name of reducing dependence on foreign oil and fostering a cleaner environment.

Here we go again with the nuclear crap

He tells the worn out tale of reactors being clean and non-polluting.

Interestingly, and certainly not surprisingly, he didn’t mention anything about cleaning up the messes left by earlier uranium mining.  Nor did he propose on how to get rid of, store, neutralize or make safe, the huge stockpile of nuclear waste piling up every day.  And let’s not forget the environmental damage to be done by mining more uranium to feed those reactors.  He gave that subject the same brush-off every nuclear energy proponent does, with the statement that more needs to be done to safely transport and store spent materials.

Don’t let anyone try to tell you the in-situ leaching process is environmentally clean.  Being an underground process, it has, under certain conditions, the ability to contaminate ground water.

45 more reactors and “clean coal”, what a wonderful promise for our future.

Image:  www.scoop.co.nz

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In May, 1918, Captain Moses Roberts, Steven Vail and some unnamed investors formed a company called the Savannah Steam Ship Company and began the work necessary to build a ship that could cross the oceans using coal and wood heat to create steam power to assist the sails. S. S. Savannah made a successful two way crossing but was a financial failure. Sailing ships continued to dominate the seas, but engineers kept improving coal and wood heated steam engines for railroads and inland river travel.

Within twenty-five years after Savannah’s initial voyage steam ships began crossing the Atlantic regularly and within seventy years steam essentially replaced sails in commerce. I can testify that sails have never disappeared - I live in one of the world’s most sail addicted towns - but anyone who has ever operated both sail and power vessels understands that as a business vessel, a sailboat is a great hobby.

Not surprisingly, when fuel prices increase rapidly, people focus their attention on ways to save money on fuel purchases. They seek to reduce their specific fuel consumption and to find cheaper sources of fuel. Both can require trade offs.

One of the easiest ways to reduce consumption is to slow down, but slowing down reduces productivity. I know that some environmentally minded people might scoff and say, “so what”, but if all of the ships on the ocean slowed down by 10%, we would need 10% more ships to carry the same quantity of goods. Each of those ships would require materials and energy to build, they would be a bit less profitable and some of the owners might be tempted to find other ways to save money, like buying cheaper fuel.

With the large engines used on ships, there are often a variety of available fuel options at different price points, but the lower priced fuel often comes with some real environmental baggage. There has been a lot of attention paid - finally - to the fact that ocean going ships are prodigious sources of sulfur emissions and other noxious pollutants since they often burn the dregs left over from refining - a fuel known as residual fuel. Based on studies that made a big splash at the end of 2007, ship emissions are now considered to the source of about 60,000 early deaths every year.

A friend of mine pointed me to a post on Treehugger.com titled Slower Shipping Could Reduce GHG Impact that discussed additional options for reducing fuel cost and environmental impact. In addition to slower speeds, the post and associated comments mention schemes that add sails to assist in propulsion. When fuel prices are high enough, such schemes can provide a positive return on investment by cutting several percentage points of off some large fuel bills. (An ocean going ship with a 70 MW power plant would burn about 90,000 gallons of fuel every day. When marine diesel fuel costs $5 per gallon, a 5% fuel savings is worth $22,500 per day.)

My recommendation is different. Let’s get rid of all of the emissions, switch to a fuel that costs about 2% of the cost per unit heat (50 cents per million BTU versus $25 per million BTU) as marine diesel fuel, and increase shipping speed so that ocean going ships can more readily compete with aircraft for time sensitive shipments. It is possible to achieve that amazing feat using technology that has been in use for more than 50 years, all we have to do is to follow the example of another pioneering financial failure named Savannah.

Nuclear powered ships are well proven, there are tens of thousands of people around the world who know how to operate, build and maintain them, and they offer capabilities that the world needs today. Because nuclear ship propulsion plants would be much smaller than the commercial nuclear power plants that are currently either under construction or being planned, they would not necessarily have to wait in the same supply chain lines for large components.

There was a time (1962-1972) when the United States produced about 100 ocean going nuclear plants in just a decade; such an industrial effort today would yield great benefits. Just think about all of the emissions that would not be released and all of the oil that would no longer be burned at sea. The effect on the market price for the rest of us would be the same as finding a new deposit capable of expanding production to about 5-8 million barrels of oil per day. That is at least 2-3 times as large as ANWAR.

Update posted June 20, 2008: A couple of days after posting this, Joe Stroud contacted me to share an updated photo of the N.S. Savannah that was taken in Baltimore, Maryland on May 23, 2008. The date was 50 years to the day after her keel was laid in 1958. Until last year, Savannah had been slowly deteriorating in the James River Fleet, but the Maritime Administration has invested some money to stabilize and repaint her. Though her reactor has not operated for more than 30 years, she is still a pretty ship.

Photo credits: Schooner under full sail and Annapolis Sailboat Show from Rod Adams under Creative Commons.
N. S. Savannah under power from US Government archives.
Savannah moored in Baltimore, MD on May 23, 2008 with permission from Joe Stroud.

Regardless of who is elected next November, both candidates agree that climate change is a fact and not a theory. “I know that climate change is real,” said John McCain. “We can have a debate about how serious it is, but the debate about climate change is over.”

McCain and Obama however vary widely in their response to this issue, leaving the American people with a choice of approaches when choosing the next president. McCain’s primary weapons in this battle includes implementing a cap and trade system for emissions and utilizing greater amounts of nuclear power.

Cap and Trade

“Cap and trade is being implemented in Europe and they have stumbled and they’ve had problems but it is still the right thing to do,” said John McCain. “It is what we did in relation to acid rain.”

One of the reasons McCain supports this approach is because it encourages the market to respond with the lowest cost approach. He believes the market will correct itself with the use of cleaner technologies without the need for intervention, such as a tax credit or major investment from the government.

One challenge with this plan is that we don’t operate in a free market, which is needed for the market to correct the problem. Large subsidies for oil companies makes alternative energy sources less affordable. Many of the hidden costs of pollution are not accounted for, even under a cap and trade system. For example, who is paying for the hospital visits when a child has an asthma attack?

Nuclear Power

“Nuclear power has got to be part of any real meaningful effort that we are going to make to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said McCain. “It has got to be part of the equation.”

McCain is concerned about proposed coal power plants and encourages development of nuclear power. Despite his view that the market should correct itself, in May of 2005 and January of 2007, McCain and Lieberman introduced a climate change bills that would give billions in subsidies to the nuclear industry.

Renewable Energy

Although McCain says that he supports renewable energy, he has set so specific targets. John McCain’s website makes no mention of solar, wind, renewable energy, or even public transportation under the section on climate change and has no section on energy.

The Senate was one vote shy of passing an economic stimulus package earlier this year that contained an incentive for solar energy. McCain didn’t show up to vote.

“Coal fired power plants,” said McCain “are being proposed to be built all over this country…If you can generate that power and set up a station that is powered by solar, by God I would love it, but you know we don’t have that technology.” Despite the advancement of renewable energy in recent years, McCain doesn’t support incentives similar to what he has proposed for nuclear power.

Related Posts on Climate Change and Renewable Energy:

• Solar Thermal Electricity: Can it Replace Coal, Gas, and Oil?
• McCain and Obama Differ on Energy
• Obama’s Plan to Reduce Foreign Oil Dependence
• U.S. Cap and Trade Politics and the Election

As promised in a podcast interview on February 11th,
Edward Sproat, manager of the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada, filed a license application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Work at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been underway for two decades, preparing it for this next phase, licensing and actual construction of the facility. It was supposed to have been completed and receiving nuclear waste by 1998. The project has been stalled because of funding problems, allegations of misrepresented quality checks and never-ending legal challenges, which will undoubtedly continue to pile up.

The 8,600 page application calls for storing spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in underground tunnels in the mountain. At present, there are more than 5,600 metric tons of waste being stored at 120 sites in 39 states.

Sproat says with funding and necessary approvals, the site could begin accepting nuclear waste by 2020. The project is expected to cost between $70 billion and $80 billion.

If completed, and to opponents that’s a very big “IF”, Yucca Mountain would be capable of storing 70,000 metric tons of waste. The Energy Department has already asked Congress to expand the repository if companies go ahead with construction up to 30 new reactor units by 2010.

Missing from the application is a final public radiation-exposure standard, or how effective the facility would protect the public from radiation leakage. The EPA’s standard was 10,000 years, but a federal court ruled the standard should be set at one million years, the time it would take some isotopes to become safe.

The application will undergo a 90-day review to determine if it’s complete, but that process could drag on for three and maybe four years.

What are the chances of this really happening?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,(D-NV) has successfully helped cut congressional funding for Yucca Mountain, and vows to do anything necessary to stop the project. Should Americans put a Democrat in the White House, and each house have a Democratic majority, some believe the Yucca Mountain project will become little more than a big hole in a Nevada mountain.

More information on the License Application and DOE’s Yucca Mountain Project is available at the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management’s website.

Image Credit: Mineral County Yucca Mountain Oversight Program

Conversely, a day later, Greenpeace published a piece on their website eviscerating nuclear power.

Oh let the fun begin!

As I mentioned, this is not a new argument, as Moore has recently taken up the reigns for causes Greenpeace opposes. Old-growth logging, keeping polyvinyl chlorides and now nuclear energy have definitely not endeared him towards his former environmental group.

However we don’t get to see so vividly the argument unfold like it has this week. Moore’s comments were reported on by Thursday of last week, and Greenpeace’s statement came out the day after. There is definitely some damage control happening; especially if the language and rhetoric from Greenpeace has anything to say about it.

Greenpeace banked their piece on the 22^nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which our own Max Lindberg touched on in the latest edition of The Lindberg Report. Their impassioned plea to stop similar disasters from happening was nothing but a major scare tactic. The opening paragraphs would have even the most conservative thinker fleeing from a nuclear reactor, if there was no previous knowledge at hand.

In fact, it seems that if it wasn’t for Greenpeace, nuclear reactors with bad regulatory conditions and poor safety measures would be springing up all over the place.

As for what Moore had to say, he was somewhat more circumspect. Noting that there wasn’t enough potential for wind, solar, hydroelectric or geothermal to replace coal – which he described as having “…the worst health impacts of anything we are doing today,” – Moore pointed to Nuclear as the only clean path for us to take.

And as much as it would be nice to see fields of wind turbines or solar panels, and oceans worth of hydroelectric turbines, the incentive is not there; not to mention the sheer number of constructions that would need to be implemented.

Make sure you check out both articles. The Greenpeace one can be found here and Moore’s story can be found at the Idaho Statesmen here. And make sure to check out Max’s interview with Kenneth Bossong, co-director of UAEA, about the anniversary of Chernobyl.

I spoke with Kenneth Bossong, co-director of UAEA, about the anniversary, and asked him to tell us more about his organization.

National Geographic Photo

For all the minorities in this country who have raised pluperfect hell about their past or current situations, the American Indian has been the quietist, and I wonder why.

Before you write me nasty emails, I’m not minimizing the concerns of minorities in this country: they have their issues and the right to use their voices, and that’s good.

But think for a moment about the original settlers of this land, the American Indian.

They did just fine for centuries, sustaining their cultures with the fruits of the land, picking fights and having wars, just like we all do.

Then, came the white man (no emails please, because that’s what happened), who invaded the natives’ birthright, confiscated their tribal lands, transferred them to reservations and literally forgot about them. Many of those Native Americans to this very day are without electricity and running water, in some cases, living in dirt poor conditions, and they languish without raising their voices.

How incredibly sad.

To add insult to this incomprehensible indignity, mining companies in search of uranium invaded their tribal homes, gouged out huge amounts of topsoil, taking what uranium they could profitably retrieve and leaving open sores bleeding toxic radiation into the soil, air and water.

Their legacy? Still-born babies, children with birth defects, cancer for hundreds, maybe even thousands, livestock mutations and God only knows what else. Maybe to the nuclear industry and our federal government, these people are considered “collateral damage.”

The government that put these noble people onto these lands, quickly approved the mining claims and encouraged uranium miners to take what they can, and in many cases paid only lip service to the clean-up process.

Now, with the price of uranium soaring, those uranium people are at it again, boring test holes on federal lands, in our “protected” forests, and on Indian nation lands.

For the first time in the history of this country, the Navajo communities of Crownpoint and Church Rock, New Mexico are saying NO to the feds and uranium miners.

In an unprecedented move, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will be challenged in Federal appeals court for its approval of a source materials license for an in situ leach uranium mine on Navajo tribal lands.

The New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC), will present oral arguments on May 12 to a panel of Federal judges in Denver, asking that the NRC decision to allow mining be set aside.

Eric Jantz, an attorney for the NMELC, said in a news release:

“The importance of our hearing on May 12 cannot be overstated. “We are talking about the land, water, air and health of two whole communities. There are people on this land grazing their cattle and hauling their daily drinking water.”

The company in question, Hydro Resources, is proposing mining operations in four areas in the Church Rock-Crownpoint region. The NRC approved the license in 2006, but the New Mexico Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit in 2007, asking that the license application be overturned.

In it’s release, the NMELC states the NRC has violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the Atomic Energy Act, and it’s own regulations.

The NMELC’s clients are appealing the following points:

Hydro Resources failed to prove that it will protect groundwater from contamination by uranium and other toxic heavy metals. The company failed to ensure that the health of residents near the mines would be protected from damaging radioactive air emissions.

Hydro Resources’ proposed financial bond for the site is inadequate to ensure that the site(s) would be cleaned up in the event that the company is unable to undertake reclamation of the land and/or water impacted by the mining.

Three cheers for the Navajo Nation, for standing up to our big-brother government.

My stand on nuclear energy is well-stated, en toto: it’s a dirty, dangerous, toxic, life-threatening industry and until miners are held responsible for the mess they make, there should be no new mining of nuclear materials in America.

Photo: LA Times

In light of our new Live Debate on nuclear energy running in our Green Options Discussion Forum, I see an opportunity to provide some context with another gem from the e2 energy series on PBS. e2 energy is a series of well-produced and thought-provoking pieces that go beyond the issues raised in the longer programs. Running time is 3 minutes.

Rod and Matt have started their discussion, and your invited to join in by 1) voting in the poll at the top of the forum, and 2) starting your own discussion on the topic in the Renewable Energy forum. While they’re focusing on a potential British-French partnership to ramp up the production of nuclear power, the topic and arguments have implications for all of us. So, whether you’re in London or Lincoln (any Lincoln), stop by and weigh in on this critical topic, regardless of where you stand on the issue.

Of those 177, sixty-seven are confirmed leakers, meaning their contents are leaching into the soil and headed toward the Columbia River. Most have exceeded their anticipated 50 year life span, creating fear of a catastrophic tank failure.

Thousands of tons of radioactive and hazardous waste has been buried in unlined landfills and 450 billion gallons of liquid waste has been poured into ponds, ditches and drainfields at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington.

These figures come from an article in today’s Washington Post, which I don’t intend to re-write. My purpose is only to call your attention to this article and hope you will read it and sense the gravity of the situation in that state.

More than a million people living downstream from Hanford are being threatened by a huge plume of groundwater contaminated with radiation and heavy metals moving their way.

The Bush administration’s proposed cleanup budget has trimmed $800 million from cleanup funding, and increased funding for nearly all other categories in the government’s nuclear program.

And they want to mine more uranium, build more nuclear power plants and pile up more spent radioactive material with no where to go, but possibly our drinking water and riding along with that breeze we inhale.

If you’d like to review some Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports on nuclear issues, I suggest you start with these eye openers.

• GAO report on the Hanford facility as recent as Jan 22, 2008.
• GAO reports on nuclear cleanup issues as recent as Nov 15,2007.
• GAO reports on hazardous waste issues as recent as Nov 13, 2007.
• GAO reports on uranium mining cleanup as recent as Oct 26, 2007.

You may find some duplicity in the reports, but there’s plenty of information to keep the interested person quite busy.

The afternoon and evening hearings are set for Tuesday, March 4, in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

Three Mile Island’s operators are asking for a 20-year extension for reactor 1, whose existing 40-year license is set to expire on April 19, 2014. Such extensions have so far been fairly easy to come by, with the NRC having OKd 48 extensions so far for the U.S.’s 104 operating nuclear plants.

NRC officials say reactor 1 has operated safely throughout its history. Unlike the no-longer-functioning reactor 2, which became the source of the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history on March 28, 1979.

The accident occurred when the reactor’s water-cooling system failed, leading to a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The incident caused some release of radioactive material into the atmosphere, but subsequent studies have not found any evidence of health problems in the area surrounding the facility near Harrisburg.

A study from the Keystone Center concluded the average radiation exposure to people in the vicinity of Three Mile Island was small, about one-sixth the amount provided by a full set of chest x-rays.

Marshall Cohen, an official of the Nuclear Energy Institute told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the industry is looking to several communities that might welcome interim storage of its used fuel.

Two or three communities, according to Cohen, are showing interest in the proposition, but he declined to name them pending further negotiations. He did say, however, that some were among the 11 sites that once volunteered to host a government run nuclear waste reprocessing site. Those states were Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina and Washington..

The move is seen as a major shift from reliance on completion of the Yucca Mountain project that would send spent waste to reprocessing facilities. Presently waste is stored on above-ground pads and in steel and concrete casks. The Department of Energy has voiced its disapproval of such action, citing political, legal and technical challenges.

This wouldn’t rule out the anticipated completion of Yucca Mountain, but could answer the question of what to do with radioactive waste that’s piling up at nuclear facilities around the country. Should the new Congress decided to halt the Nevada project, as has been threatened, industry officials believe their proposal will offer some relief to local reactor sites until a permanent repository is completed.

This is the classic “Not in my back yard” battle, even more understandable since Nevada was the site of nuclear weapons testing beginning in 1951. There were 100 atmospheric tests until they went underground in 1962, when 828 devices were exploded. Testing ceased in 1992, although the Nevada Test Site is still an active research area.

It’s easy to see why Nevadans are tired of the word, “nuclear” and object to the storage of thousands of tons of highly radioactive materials just 100 miles from the state’s major tourist attraction, Las Vegas.

Here is Mr. Sproat with his answer to that question, and other observations about Yucca Mountain and the future.

You may recall my interview with Bob Loux about Yucca Mountain and the Nevada point of view. It is available in three parts, listed below.

Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Case Podcast, Part One

Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Case Podcast, Part Two

Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Case Podcast, Part Three

An Alabama reactor had to shutdown for a brief period in the summer, and officials in the Southeast now say it is becoming a crisis.

Water is essential for the operation of a nuclear facility, primarily to cool used steam generated by the nuclear reactors which run the electricity-generating turbines.

Some plants recycle cooling water in what is known as a closed system, so that process doesn’t create a real water problem.

How much water does a plant use? The Harris reactor near Raleigh, N.C., draws 33 million gallons of water a day, with 17 million gallons lost to evaporation in the cooling towers.

Duke’s McGuire plant near Charlotte, N.C. sucks up more than 1 billion gallons a day from Lake Norman, but most of that is returned to the source. The problem there, is that the lakes level is now 93.7 feet, down nearly 5 feet from a year ago. If it drops another foot, the plant may have to cease operations.

The ratepayer in the Southeast may have to eat some high rates if the trend continues. An energy analyst says replacement power would cost 10 times the going rate should plants shut down.

Source: MSNBC

In our previous podcasts, Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Case Podcast, Part One, Mr. Loux talked about his agency, it’s mission and why the state is so critical of the DOE and it’s practices.

In the second presentation, Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Cast Podcast, Part Two, he talks about the regulatory process and unsuitability of the mountain as a long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste.

In this portion of the interview, Mr. Loux addresses transportation of nuclear waste to the facility, and the apparent faltering support for the project, both in the government and in scientific circles. The Walker River Paiute Indian Nation opposed allowing building of a railroad across their reservation, allowing nuclear waste to be shipped to Yucca Mountain. I asked Mr. Loux if the issue has been resolved.

What will happen to Yucca Mountain is still a subject of speculation. Nevada Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) has a bill pending in the Senate that would end the project, and instead, require new and existing nuclear power facilities to store their spent fuel on site until a suitable repository site is developed.

The Department of Energy announced layoffs at the project, claiming lack of suitable funding when Congress cut over $100 million from the current operating budget. The DOE will probably have to go forward as best it can, since the project is mandated by Congress.

Meanwhile, all Democratic presidential candidates have made it clear they will close Yucca Mountain if and when seated in the White House. Senator Reid has been quoted as saying he will make sure the new president and Congress will bring an end to the project.

Here is a link to the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

This link will take you to a very large Government Accounting Office website, where Mr. Loux says you will find negative information on the DOE and its handling of nuclear issues.

The State of Nevada also put up a map of rail, truck and barge routes that would cover nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. This site breaks it down into states.

This is the second part of a podcast with Robert Loux, Executive Director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects in Nevada.

If you missed the first installment, it’s available at: Yucca Mountain: The Nevada Case Podcast, Part One .

In this segment, Loux discusses the Department of Energy’s regulatory process, falsehoods and other manipulation of reports. He also talks about Yucca Mountains unsuitability, even for a short term, as a nuclear repository. Loux mentions how air and water pass freely through the mountain, the earthquake faults beneath the storage area, and even the possible threat of young volcanoes in the future.

Our