Bellona Waste Report

Bellona has issued a report stating that there are 21,000 spent fuel assemblies in a storage system that will explode if water leaks in, and that water is leaking in.

It's kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it--there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it--and without the water, there's no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved--it didn't even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there's no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn't gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes--but what's your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn't, doesn't, and can't do doesn't save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

That Manhattan Project Document on Aerosolized Uranium

Once every few weeks, people who want to portray depleted uranium as the most dangerous substance on the face of the Earth trot out a document from the Manhattan Project stating that uranium could be aerosolized and used as a radiological weapon.

This happened recently, and doesn't have anything to do with what we know about uranium's radiotoxicity today. It doesn't prove any conspiracy theories and doesn't make uranium magically increase its radioactivity when aerosolized.

For the record.

How to Build a Nuclear Reactor, Vintage 1941

The British government was given documents in 1941 describing how to build a nuclear reactor.

And they sat on them.

Until Thursday, May 31.

The Manhattan Project scientists had a plutonium bomb design ready in 1944 and had to wait for a specialized weapons-production reactor to be completed in order to actually build it. If they had known the plutonium was going to be available before 1945, they could have started work on the implosion mechanism--the most difficult part--and had it ready by mid-1943.

I'm sure the families of every person killed on both sides in 1944 and 1945 will say, "Thanks, guys."

More from We Support Lee.

Depleted Uranium and the Precautionary Principle

The author of this article posted to Know_Nukes admits that their conspiracy theories about depleted uranium are probably wrong.

But what if they weren't?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don't do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren't infalliable and can't predict everything, don't do anything--even if you know the problems you'll cause are less severe than what you're currently experiencing.

How can you know that it's a net gain if you can't know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today's problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I'm all for precaution--eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I'll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

Sizewell B Goes to Russian Fuel

You can understand it, with the expense of keeping all that manufacturing equipment for one plant's fuel, but still--the Russians? Couldn't they get it from us?

One thing is certain: if the American nuclear industry doesn't immediately forget any illusions that it is special and start acting like an industry, they'll stagnate just like they have over the past 35 years.
The nuclear industry outside of Russia is the only industry in the world to respond to a great opportunity for growth by screaming "SLOW DOWN!" Well, guess what. You're never going to have everything you need to be perfect, and your suppliers that you so often complain about move at the normal speed for private industry--meaning a complete turnaround in two years is not unheard of--instead of yours. Don't worry about them. Get the orders, start innovating, and the workers will come as soon as there are jobs for them.

Remember: if not for Chernobyl--meaning, if they had banned the RBMK in 1950 like we did, and if the Soviet military hadn't tried to build power plants out of their bomb factories--the Russian nuclear industry would have a perfect safety record. They do have much better financial and management performance. There are lessons to be learned from the Russians; they're getting these orders for a reason.
And if you don't get going, the Russians are going to come over here, get the VVER-1000 certified by the NRC, and build a fleet. Do you really want that?

Link.

Ontario Update

They've hired some consultants to do a comparison of the major available reactor designs.

I disagree with the Society of Energy Professionals, however, and fully expect that McKinsey will rate AECL's Canadian nuclear technology near the bottom. The current designs remove the CANDU's traditional commercial advantages and are competitive only if there is a requirement to consume American-style reactors' waste--which Canada doesn't have. They could build a fleet down here, but in places without a lot of LWR waste, they might as well just build fast breeders.

Link.

On the New Global Warming Proposals

George Bush has proposed a series of international meetings on how to replace the Kyoto Protocol with something that works. At this point, I think it's fairly evident that:
1. The Kyoto Protocol doesn't go far enough and has set up a system which has been manipulated to obstruct real progress.
2. Global warming as a result of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere beyond the capability of natural systems to absorb it is a fact of physics.
3. We need a concrete procedure in place for an orderly, face-saving transition from the combustion era instead of more meetings and non-binding agreements.

Count me skeptical. I don't see anything here that satisfies the third point, but perhaps George Bush knows by now that any proposal of his will be rejected simply because it came from him (which is wrong, even though I don't agree with him on much), and is trying to set up an international conference where Obama or Hillary will present something nearly identical to what he would have.
Let's just hope that successor doesn't drop the ball.

Link.

American Centrifuge Plant Under Construction

As of May 31.

USEC has also committed to keeping Paducah open for another five years. The American Centrifuge Plant will not be fully operational until at least 2012; they say it will start enriching uranium in 2009.

Link.

NRC, POGO, and Worker Fatigue

The NRC has proposed implementing one of the few POGO recommendations I agree with: reducing hours for security guards at nuclear power plants. I'd like to take this opportunity to draw a distinction between watchdogs and attack groups. We don't like to engage either, since neither tend to know what they're doing, and the NRC's unwillingness to admit anyone to discussions who isn't a member of the good ol' boy network doesn't help, but I submit that there is a difference that we need to be aware of.

We're used to being under attack; there hasn't been a moment in the last 40 years when we weren't. We are used to ignorant arguments coming from groups that are trying to shut down the industry, and accordingly have gotten used to taking any ignorant argument as a threat to shut down the industry. This, I believe, is a mistake.

Greenpeace and NIRS are attack groups. They have campaigns, use words like "shut" and "stop," and have a stated aim of trying to destroy nuclear technology. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be exposed as fools in public, their sources of volunteers and money cut off, and the loons in charge marginalized. We are familiar with them, their message, their strategy, and their tactics.

POGO, on the other hand, suffers from exactly the same problem as the industry and NRC: nuclear exceptionalism. They are a watchdog group; they believe that the NRC and government in general are not doing the best possible job and are trying to expose problems so they can be fixed. We disagree with them a lot, but they're not out to get us. They aren't the problem. Don't attack them in the manner that Greenpeace and NIRS attack the industry.

Joe Six-Pack thinks nuclear power plants pollute, are unsafe, and produce piles of leaking, deadly waste. They want a good reason to think that nuclear power plants don't do any of those things, and we can provide it--if we act graciously and professionally, and not wimpy or suburban, and destroy these urban myths with real information. As I've said before, people are not dumb--they just have other things to worry about. Tell me an auto mechanic can't understand how a nuclear power plant works.
The key is, they can't figure it out on their own. We have to do what every other technology proponent does, and provide information and involvement. Whatever you want to say about how it should be, the public is the boss.

House of Lords on CoRWM Report

They say it's "incoherent." And it is; that's the sad part.

The report does not make any concrete proposals. It recommends that more committees be set up and the issue discussed, saying that the British government is moving too fast.
That's right: telling the British government to slow down. It's difficult to think of a recommendation that lacks initiative to a greater degree.

They also are fixed on geologic disposal and do not seem to be interested in processing beyond the existing PUREX-and-storage instead of recycling or beneficial use of fission products. That's a terrible mistake; these materials can be useful and shouldn't be dumped.

Vogtle PSC Hearing Coming Up

On June 12 at 10 AM in their hearing room at 244 Washington Street SW, Atlanta (via WAND).

As we saw with Shoreham, this is where a lot of decisions get made while we focus on NRC hearings. We really need a power structure analysis on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis if we are to organize effectively in support of new build.

GNEP Environmental Impact Statement Comments

I recently got my hands on an anti-nuclear activist's comment submitted to the Department of Energy on GNEP's environmental impact statement. It serves as an example of a few things to do when writing public comments, as well as some things not to do.

First, don't talk about morals and ethics; talk about the legal and public relations implications of the proposed action. Morals and ethics are nice, but being immoral or unethical doesn't have an immediate negative effect on the decision-makers. Being sued or inciting a riot does, and a comment must make clear that the proposed action is either illegal or will result in negative political consequences.
If the proposed action is legal and you still don't like it, you have two options. If you have enough money, lawyers are extremely creative and can concoct an admissible contention from almost anything, and trials/settlements cost the opponents money even if you lose. If you have no money and a lot of people, get about 1,000-1,500 of them to submit near-identical comments threatening protests and media activity. And above all, be prepared to follow through if they go ahead with the proposed action; you can't be caught bluffing. If you are, that's the end of your credibility.

Do not assume that they have received "expert analyses" and that you only have to second them. Know the most important points of those analyses and echo them as though you didn't know about the expert analyses--it's much more impressive to whatever bureaucrat reads the comment if they think that there's a huge groundswell of opposition for diverse, original reasons instead of three guys and their 1,500 foot soldiers.

Don't ask them to follow the procedure. They either will follow the procedure or won't, and the only thing you can do is threaten negative consequences if they don't (or do, if you don't want them to follow the procedure).

Don't include conspiracy theories. Preferably, don't originate them or subscribe to them, but don't try to analyze people's motives or do a power structure analysis, either. They don't care about that. Again, they care only about negative consequences to them politically, legally, and financially if they proceed. If you don't want them to do whatever they're doing, make it clear that your organization will inflict those negative consequences.

There are more subtle ways to threaten the DOE with legal action than to say "if you proceed with this program, we will be forced to pursue legal action." State what exactly is not legal about what they are proposing--they'll fill in the rather obvious blank if you identify yourself as a member of an organization explicitly formed to oppose the proposal. Likewise with publicity campaigns. This is only credible, however, if a large number of people from that organization write in and identify themselves as such, and it really works when that organization has an ongoing publicity campaign that has reached the decision-makers.
This is also different from the standard protest letter or letter to the editor in that the decision-makers actually receive the letter or a summary and are obligated to at least publish it. As such, speak as a negotiator and use negotiating tactics; this is not a place to do general-public-type PR.
Likewise, don't use personal attacks and don't try to tell them about what they've done. They know what they've done and using personal attacks lessens the probability that they'll accept a face-saving compromise. I'm not advocating for the further wussification of society, just differentiating between the approach needed for PR and the approach needed for negotiation. It is in fact fatal to weasel out, or to suggest solutions that don't involve the agency you're complaining about (like legislation).

Oh, and don't make grammatical and spelling errors, or do anything else that undermines your credibility. Do not feed the 'allegators'.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Right from the beginning of the nuclear power industry, we have been assured that the technology is safe."

-mng.org.uk

And it was, and still is. It's safer than fossil fuels, and (rather importantly) works.

Anti-Nuclear Net.Activism

Anti-nuclear activists have started circulating an email alert (rather, an alert in the footer of every email they send) asking people to get a (they suggest) WordPress or MySpace blog and start blogging as a way to stop nuclear power. I see some good signs here.

First, a WordPress blog in its externally-hosted form is a technical challenge for people who aren't familiar with servers, and in its free form is not powerful enough to be effective in an actual campaign. You can't even change the HTML code. MySpace, however, is a joke. There's no point trying to use it; once you get past being a joke of a movement, you have to disassemble everything you did and start over on a real platform.
We didn't make that mistake, at least not that badly. Blogger, for all its faults, is extensible. And most importantly, we made our mistakes a while ago and are starting to recover while they dig themselves a hole. They don't know that it's easier to have a tech-savvy organization set up a community that activists can join than to try to make everything work together after six or seven incompatible systems are entrenched. It seems also that anti-nuclear pages are either sophisticated ASP jobs or hacks, with nothing in between; an anti-nuclear activist who is trying to do a good job faces an almost square learning curve with almost no help from their colleagues. They are forced to cut corners and further decrease compatibility (and thus interoperability--which is the whole point).

Second, they honestly think that NEI pays everyone off, and that we're all NEI employees. Wrong. They simply, honestly, and truly do not understand that there is a difference between the industry and the supporters of the technology. That leads them to think we aren't distributed and can be beaten easily by five or six dedicated people.

Third, they concentrate on RSS. Go chase RSS, guys. Nobody uses it. It's useful only as an aggregation tool for people with nothing else to do and when it is converted to an email alert system.

Fourth, they acknowledge that the anti-nuclear movement doesn't do blogging. The first three dedicated, sustained pro-nuclear blogs (NEI, Atomic Insights, and NIOF) started in a short period in 2005. Others came along later; a second wave came along in 2006 (Freedom for Fission, We Support Lee, Energy from Thorium, and ARDT), and a third wave came along in late 2006 to early 2007 (Pebble Bed Reactor, Idaho Samizdat, Left Atomics, Nuclear Australia, NNadir). I like the fact that that number is going up with each wave (and diversifying), and NIOF is working on making it easier for people to get started--and get started in an organization.
I don't see the anti-nuclear activists, who are new to this and learn tech more slowly, getting there any faster than we did. Accordingly, I (conservatively) conclude that the anti-nuclear activists are two years behind us.
We have a window, and we have to do something with it. This little smell of blood shouldn't lead us to believe that they're dead, but should inspire us to work even harder to kick their butts and make sure they don't get up again. We must do this by removing their base of support; using the internet's core competencies (as the UNIX-HATERS Handbook says of computers, "nitpickers with elephantine memories") as a tool (not a strategy) to accelerate the process of organizing college campuses. It is clear that to do that, we need a Nuclear Advocates' Declaration of Principles (or something else similar to the Port Huron Declaration; if nothing else, to put our opinions in writing to immunize us from allegations that we're being bought off), a web-based community platform, and an internal handbook that we can keep out of anti-nuclear activists' hands until they have their own equivalent (i.e., something we can keep close to our chest for two or three years). NIOF is actively working on the second part, after which we'll obviously do the third part, but pro-nuclear activists will need to call a conference to do the first part.

In short: they're a threat, but a foreseen threat. We know what timeline, roughly, they will be operating on. Our application of game theory to proliferation--and their disdain for doing so--helps us. We know exactly what to do to prevent this threat from materializing. We can do it, and I know we will. We must. Too much is at stake, environmentally and on a public health level, for us to not do anything about it, or to fail to do what we know we can do and operate at the high level we know we can operate at.

Get up and do something!

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"ASLB rejects new contentions...but not on their merits"

-New England Coalition

...on the fact that they were being used as a deliberate delaying tactic.

The Nuclear Power Licensing Reform Act of 2007

Rep. Nita Lowey, that eminent friend of nuclear power (joined by woo-woo John Hall as well as Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, and Christopher Shays), is sponsoring a bill intended to make it even more unnecessarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant--or relicense one.

-Require that the NRC determine that plants are safe. In other words, add another piece of paper onto a process that already works.
-Require that the NRC certify that each nuclear power plant doesn't have security vulnerabilities during the licensing process. In other words, the effects of a terrorist attack are the victims' fault.
-Add another level of bureaucracy to the evacuation plans requirement, and expand the EPZ to 50 miles. More stakeholders can veto the plan under this proposal than possible today--any state within 50 miles or any federal agency involved in emergency management--increasing the likelihood of Shoreham-type politics.
-Require that the NRC do the same reviews for a renewal that they do for a licensing, most of which are completely pointless, since the design doesn't change. In reality, all a renewal application should have to prove safety-wise is that a plant's designed-in safety effects won't be affected by aging.
-Require the NRC to determine in any relicensing that the population density around the plant hasn't changed to the point where it is defined as "urban siting," which is bad for some reason. In other words, shut down Indian Point.

Fortunately, the bill doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting past President Bush even if it did pass. But we're going to have to watch out for this in a couple years, when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that they're tough on these "problems." Indian Point is going to have a constant fight on its hands come 2009.

Oh, and four Democrats and one Republican do not a bipartisan coalition make. Maybe they put the "coal" in "coalition" (or the "mental" in "environmentalist"), but not much more.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear or Geothermal power plants? Neither."

-'amazngdrx'

Geothermal energy comes from the heat given off when radiation from natural radioactive materials inside the Earth is absorbed by nearby rock or other materials. So it is actually a kind of nuclear power.

It is more commonly grouped with wind and solar under the banner of "renewable energy," but this quote goes to show that "renewable" actually means "unfeasible." When they realize that geothermal energy might in fact work, it becomes scum, the enemy of the environment. Energy allows us to do things, so if the objective is to starve polluting processes so that they can't operate (a perfectly reasonable and understandable tactic), any functional energy source must be opposed, existing ones must be made as expensive as possible, and the depletion of reserves must be sped up--with a ban on exploration for new supplies--until there is no alternative but to revert to the solar-powered 1600-vintage "happy peasant lifestyle." A lifestyle, I might add, which would have killed me at birth.
Thus, I ain't too happy about proposals like this. I can put two and two together, and I like my energy. To quote one of the store designs (itself a quote):

Cancer in Sweden from Chernobyl, or, Why the LNT Needs a Swift Kick

A completely bogus study from Sweden purporting to demonstrate that people are more likely to get cancer if exposed to pre-industrial levels of radiation than if they were exposed to atomic bomb detonations once again raises a question about anti-nuclear groups' unwavering support of the politically-motivated Linear-No-Threshold radiation impact hypothesis (LNT):

Why on Earth do they support it?

The LNT is, at its core, an assumption. A graph is constructed, with radiation exposure on the horizontal axis and cancer deaths on the vertical axis. The Japanese atomic bombing survivors' exposure and cancer data is then plotted, and a line is drawn from there to zero radiation and zero cancer.
Seriously.
No low-dose data is included--not from pre-industrial cancer rates, which involved basically the same radiation exposure as today yet were practically nonexistent, and not from the definitive study on the matter, which tracked all the radiation ever received by maintenance crews in Navy nuclear shipyards--and found a mortality rate over 20% lower than their coworkers in non-nuclear shipyards.

But if anti-nuclear groups want a scientific investigation of the health effects of radiation, as they so often claim to do, why do they support an assumption?

Pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, and in-between organizations all should recognize the fallacy of relying on assumptions, and insist on a well-funded NAS investigation of the health effects of ionizing radiation, with the objective of identifying whether or not there is a threshold, and if there is one, upper and lower bounds.
I call on anti-nuclear groups to show that they have confidence in their claims by submitting them for rigorous peer review.

Harris Deferred

Yep.

This is the first time that's happened in the "nuclear renaissance," and it won't be the last time. Apparently a conservation program will be cheaper for the utility, since all the capital investments involved will be made by consumers.

They were originally going to submit a COL application later this year; this presumably pushes it back to 2009.

More from We Support Lee.

Olkiluoto Unit 4 Proposed

They're planning to cut through the red tape by summer 2008, with construction starting around 2013 and operation in 2018. That leaves five years for the Finnish government to make a decision.

I again state my firm belief that there is nothing about a nuclear power plant that merits all this bureaucratic baloney. If the thing burned oil it'd be up and running in two years, but a nuclear power plant with less environmental impact by far must jump through hoops that include a full vote of the Finnish Parliament.

Link.

Sites Under Consideration in South Africa

"-Thyspunt, near Cape St Francis.
-Bantamsklip, 10 km southeast of Pearly Beach.
-Duynefontein, next to Koeberg in the Western Cape.
-Brazil, in the Northern Cape.
-Skulpfontein, in the Northern Cape."

-Link.

Designs were not mentioned, but presumably the AP1000, EPR, and ESBWR are under consideration (PWRs are the only type mentioned).
This doesn't cover the pebble-bed reactors also proposed for South Africa.

UK Government Finances and Decommissioning

The Department of Trade and Industry has sold its $4 billion share in British Energy and placed the profits in a fund to manage the dismantling of a fleet of reactors built to an ill-advised reactor design that has been compared to the Stanley Steamer. A similar design was built once in the United States (Colorado's Fort St. Vrain), with even worse results.

Link.

"Two or Three More Reactors" for TVA

Presumably, Watts Bar 2 and Bellefonte 1-2. "Potentially."

Let's just hope they don't divide their attention and pull a "Whoops."

Link.

Yet Again, The Difference Between Safety and Performance

This Press of Atlantic City article starts with the predictable "A month after receiving a clean bill of health from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," neglecting the fact that they, well, did, and that determination still applies.

The plant can shut down without there being a safety problem. If there is a technical problem that prevents them from being able to efficiently generate electricity, the utility will shut the plant down, replace the part in question, and bring it back up. There is nothing about such a problem that would cause a nuclear accident--I refer you to the overblown reaction to an even less-relevant electrical problem at the Indian Point plant in New York.

Chill out.

RTGs for Mars

The Mars Science Laboratory will carry a device known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat given off when radiation is absorbed by metal into electricity, with no moving parts.
All that's required is a piece of radioactive material, sealed up inside metal or ceramic, and a thermocouple. The result is a lot of electricity from a small device that takes care of itself, for as long as the material is radioactive (a slight problem being the fact that the longer the material is radioactive, the less radioactive it actually is--materials that are chosen are the best combinations of time and activity, like plutonium-238 or the "nuclear waste" substance strontium-90). See a post from July 2005 for more.

It apparently wasn't discussed very loudly until recently for political reasons, given the Moon-hoax-theorist level of ignorance surrounding the last major RTG mission, Cassini.

Browns Ferry Update

Anti-nuclear activist Frieda Berryhill has left no turn unstoned in a recently-published conspiracy theory about the Browns Ferry accident in 1975.

She describes the opposition to the Summit reactors, proposed in 1973 and canceled in 1975, for no reason other than the old they-don't-want-them-as-neighbors argument (which makes about as much sense as the identical argument made against racial integration in the 1960s). They were certainly safe (that type of reactor--a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)--cannot even melt down), would have produced less waste than the average American reactor (approaching Canadian efficiency), and pose zero proliferation threat. They could even have run off of Hope Creek and Salem's nuclear waste, with some minor processing to change its shape. The "excess capacity" argument doesn't really hold, either, since a lot of that was oil-fired (and becoming rapidly uneconomic with the 1973 Arab oil embargo), you need some excess capacity in case a major plant breaks down, and electricity demand was growing fast enough to quickly eliminate any cushion.

But here's where it gets interesting. She says that the Browns Ferry fire in 1975 was somehow covered up by a conspiracy involving the industry periodical Nucleonics Week (which she incorrectly refers to as "Nuclearonics Week"), the industry's trade association at the time (the Atomic Industrial Forum), and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, because somebody at DuPont had not heard of the accident (she also gets 55 Crackpot Points for her use of all-caps, but I digress). Now, if that's not a damning charge, I don't know what is.

On top of that, she apparently thinks that Browns Ferry Unit 1's startup hiccups, which happen to any newly-restarted power plant of any type, mean that the unit will be permanently shut down and decommissioned, wasting $1.8 billion but allowing them to get a license renewal (which they got before the restart) and BILK THE TAXPAYER OF BILLIONS (no specifics on how that will happen). Or maybe they'll replace a hose and fix a pump, which is what they did.

"Are you on drugs?"

-Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny

Sadly, this is representative of anti-nuclear opinion--which unfortunately doesn't get published a whole lot. I have a strong suspicion that we're rebutting arguments that people don't worry a lot about (such as the proliferation potential of PUREX) without covering most people's major concerns and certainly not going on the offensive. For example, most people probably think that there aren't any nuclear power plants any more, that uranium is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide, and that global warming is caused by human activity per se instead of a physical process that humans are using (carbon combustion). They certainly think that nuclear reactors can explode like atomic bombs. I've said it before, but I think the best answer overall is to explain how a nuclear reactor works in conceptual terms (especially to young people, who basically "get" the engineering design process), so that the urban myths don't get started in the first place. There aren't a whole lot of urban myths about coal burning, because people understand it. They can't design a coal burning power plant, but people have internalized the concept of combustion. And I don't see any reason why somebody who can disassemble and reassemble a Volvo carburetor by memory can't understand the very simple mechanism behind a nuclear reactor. Again, they're not designing it; they don't have a master's degree in it, but they know how it works. I can (and have) explained to a group of 50% Green, 40% Democrat and 10% Republican students what the difference is between a PWR and RBMK, in 20 minutes, without using the word "moderator," such that they knew where I was going half-way through an explanation of Chernobyl's graphite-tipped-control-rods problem. And as those who know me will tell you, I am no master communicator. We just have to abandon our nuclear exceptionalist egos and tell it like it is in ordinary terms.
If we try to make nuclear energy seem impressive and use difficult-to-understand terminology, we're going to leave the door open for people to just make stuff up. But I know we can do better than that. I know we will do better than that.

Public Meetings on Palo Verde

Two are coming up:

1. There will be an observation-only meeting on June 6 from 6:30 PM until the cows come home, at the Saddle Mountain Unified School District Administration Building Board Room, 38201 W. Indian School Road, Tonopah, Arizona, to discuss performance improvements that the NRC wants.

2. On June 7th at 6:30 PM, there will be a town hall meeting in the cafeteria at Ruth Fisher Elementary School (same address) to discuss the plan.

Get out and hellraise!

Link.

On the International Fuel Bank

$50 million has been approved by a House committee for an IAEA program to guarantee nuclear fuel to countries that waive their right to fuel cycle facilities. There are a number of things wrong with the concept, however:

1. There's nothing wrong with fuel cycle facilties, and there are ways to determine whether a dual-use facility (one that can theoretically be used for civilian or military applications) is being used for peaceful purposes. The problem is not the presence of the facilities; it is excess capacity at those facilities. Giving them long-term customers--nuclear power plants--is the only reliable way to ensure that they aren't used by the military. They can also be designed to not be able to handle weapons-grade material, or more advanced fuel cycles can be used that don't require enrichment or plutonium recovery. This program codifies the idea that reprocessing is plutonium recovery, which it usually is, but doesn't have to be. It does not in any way weaken nonproliferation efforts to draw a distinction between them, and actually strengthens them by removing an excuse to have a dual-use facility.
2. Taking existing military facilities and using them for peaceful purposes is a good thing. This program would ask countries to entirely dismantle them.
3. Countries opt for nuclear power largely for security reasons. Gas can be cut off and start causing blackouts within a few hours--but nuclear reactors can be run for up to two years without refueling, so there is no point to cutting off nuclear fuel shipments as a political negotiating tactic. Requiring countries to give up their "stash" of unused fuel and mandating that they maintain a "good record" with an international community dominated by radiophobe politicians or lose their fuel shipments erodes the independence provided by nuclear power. More here.

Link.

Swedish Problems?

Swedish regulators (who are possibly even less rational than the NRC) ordered a work stoppage effective June 21 (?) for paperwork violations ("failure to provide sufficient evidence" and "insufficient methods").

Notice how no actual problems are involved.

Link.

McGaffigan Retrospective

Terminally ill NRC Commissioner Ed McGaffigan issued the following statement on the 29th:

"This is my twelfth and last All-Hands Meeting. While I have served for about one-third of NRC’s history, I believe I have attended over seventy percent of these meetings. I enjoy them for the interaction we have with you.

Early in my tenure on the Commission, then-Chairman Jackson referred to me at a public meeting as the “fast” Commissioner, if I remember correctly because of the impatience I had already conveyed on multiple occasions that NRC needed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various NRC processes. Or perhaps it was because I still ran marathons and coached my children’s teams.

I am not so fast anymore as the melanoma I have been battling the last seven and a half years has advanced, particularly over the last eleven months. But I am as dedicated today as I was in 1996 to this great institution and to you, the staff who have made clear over the past decade that you wanted to move forward every bit as much as my fellow Commissioners and I did.

Together we have achieved great things in the last decade. This is probably not the time to enumerate them because I might still be talking at 3:30 p.m. But I want to thank you sincerely for your dedicated, at times approaching miraculous, efforts to bring about numerous changes that have improved safety and security while providing far more information to the public than in 1996.

Can the NRC of the future be better still? Absolutely. But it will take equal dedication from the forty percent of our staff who have been with us four years or less, and perhaps even stronger leadership from the Commission and senior staff at a time when both groups will be far less stable than over the past eleven years, as once distant retirement dates are now upon them and well-deserved retirements beckon.

My request to you, the NRC staff, in this last All-Hands Meeting I will attend is that you rededicate yourselves to excellence in the years ahead.

How do I define excellence in a regulator? Let me start with my favorite quotation. It’s from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. During my ten months in Europe on a fellowship after graduating from college, I took advantage of the cold and wet European winter to study the history of each country I visited. Lawrence writes: “All men dream, but not equally. Some dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds and wake in the day to find it is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.”

For me, in all my federal service, I have been committed to being a dangerous man, a dreamer of the day. So the first step to excellence in a regulator is a devotion to being a dreamer of the day.

The second step to excellence is being committed to following the facts as they are, not as one might wish them to be. Avoid theoretical or ideological thinking, where facts not fitting preconceived models or ideas are rejected and mistakes inevitably follow.

The third step in a pathway to excellence is to avoid complacency in all of our activities. Overall industry performance is today at its highest level ever. But there are always outliers and it is our duty to the American people to do our best to identify those outliers, to avoid any future Davis-Besse type event, the only significant precursor during my almost eleven years with the Commission.

The fourth step to excellence is to dedicate oneself to lifetime learning to ensure that you remain the absolute best scientific, technical, engineering and legal regulatory agency on this planet. I learn something new almost every day and get tremendous satisfaction from that. I hope you all do.

The fifth pathway to excellence is to follow the law in all our regulatory decisions. The Atomic Energy Act specifies a “reasonable assurance of adequate protection” standard. It does not specify “absolute assurance of perfect protection” which some stakeholders would prefer and which would make pursuit of nuclear technologies and any other technologies impossible if applied to them. The Constitution makes changing laws difficult. Those who would fundamentally change our statutes do not have the votes to bring about such change. Nor should they.

The sixth pathway to excellence is a commitment to welcome full debate of issues as they arise. I am proud of those who voice differing views at this agency. Over the past decade we have made it easier to do so through new mechanisms such as non-concurrences, while still achieving timeliness in our regulatory decisions. I have not always agreed with the non-concurrences, although not infrequently the Commission has agreed with the non-concurrence. But I welcome all of them as a signal of a vibrant regulatory agency, honestly dealing with often ambiguous data.

My seventh and final pathway to excellence is a commitment to openness and honest dialogue with all of our external stakeholders. We must become better communicators of NRC’s excellence and of our deep commitment to the health and safety of our fellow citizens.

If NRC staff in the future follow these paths to excellence, the sky will be the limit in the respect the agency will garner from our fellow citizens with one exception, the anti-nuclear interest groups who have only a single goal, to prevent the use of nuclear reactors and other nuclear materials, no matter how safe and secure. They will continue to unjustly and without basis accuse you of negligence, and worse.

I have been known for the frankness of my public remarks over my tenure. Many of my so-called controversial remarks have been spoken to defend this great institution from baseless calumny. We all received an insight into one of these groups when they mistakenly issued a press release upon the occasion of the President’s visit to Pennsylvania last May. The release stated - and I quote - “[FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”

Safety and security policy cannot be based on factoids. When such tactics are used in my presence, I tend not to give quarter. It’s the Irish in me, perhaps. But I have no tolerance for factoids or for baseless attacks on this great institution. I have an open door to anyone in the anti-nuclear community. They have rarely taken me up on the offer, perhaps because they know I will not accept junk science, distortion of NRC information, bumper stickers, slogans and factoids from them.

I have served this government for over thirty-one years, and because I lucked out in winning my first job in the Foreign Service in 1976, I have always been at the most senior levels of government. I have been involved in many policy debates that go well beyond the mission of this institution. But my touchstone has been a commitment to as close to absolute honesty in those debates as is humanly possible. That is, and should always remain, NRC’s commitment, even if some groups do not share that commitment and resort to distortion.

It has been a great honor to serve with you, to learn from you, and to defend you. All human institutions are imperfect and we are going to make mistakes. The only significant precursor in my tenure, the Davis-Besse head corrosion event, comes to mind. But no one should ever doubt that you are the nation’s nuclear safety and security watchdogs, not those who attempt to give themselves that title. My wish is that this institution, today a shining example of excellence among all safety regulators worldwide, will constantly rededicate itself to excellence as each new generation of employees comes on board so that the nation can safely and securely utilize the enormous potential of nuclear power and radioactive materials.

Thank you and God bless you all."

-Link.

Diablo Canyon ISFSI Environmental Assessment Available

This one includes an assessment of terrorism as though it were a consequence of building the facility. Obviously, terrorism is an attempt to destroy the facility, not a risk of its operation, so there's no need to evaluate it. Are riots to be used as a mark against integration?

Update: Mothers for Peace has issued the predictable press release, saying that the facility shouldn't be licensed until every possible terrorism scenario has been shown to be completely impossible, which obviously can't be done.

Link.

Kazakhstan to "Study" Conversion Plant

Diversification is good, eh?

Link.

What About All Those Indigenous Populations That Are Being Used as a Dumping Ground?

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they'll stop using the "environmental racism" argument? Don't hold your breath.

Link.

Online Petitions

A reminder and update to the recent post about an anti-nuclear petition to start a politically-motivated investigation of the NRC: they're using an online petition. Legislators ignore online petitions, because a bot could easily be programmed to sign it a million times with random names (e.g., Geraldo Lubczynski) and no verification. They pay attention to letters from their constituents, and to a certain extent, written petitions that have been the subject of media campaigns. They pay a lot of attention to petitions to get a referendum on the ballot, in states where this is possible.

Plus, think about it: how is it going to get delivered? Isn't it a lot easier to provide people with an email form and writing tips?

The only conceivable use for an online petition is to "test the waters" about what ideas can find support on the internet. There is little use for such an exercise; any idea can find support on the internet, and the blogosphere in peer-review mode (much as Ruth Sponsler and I did a while back w.r.t campus organizing) is much faster at evaluating soundbites. Blogs combine quick response with thoroughness; webrings and link lists, while they basically create echo chambers, remove much of the requirement for physical meetings to discuss strategy. The disadvantage is that they're public, but their limited readership provides the internet equivalent of a focus group. Online petitions, on the other hand, only provide a yes/no option--and you never hear from the "no" people.

Don't use online petitions; use a letter-writing campaign, or a ballot item, with the internet as an organizing tool (i.e., as a substitute for the phone tree). These facts have been known since about 2000, but the anti-nuclear activists are showing how new they are to net.activism by using online petitions. Let them shoot themselves in the foot.

DOE Tailings Debate in the New York Times

The Department of Energy has 28,000 tons of uranium left over from enrichment, which, one would think, should be auctioned. Dumping it into the market could lower the price of uranium and affect the viability of new mines, more efficient reactors, and recycling technology.

USEC, however, wants it all for free. Anti-nuclear groups want it called "nuclear waste" and dumped in Yucca Mountain instead of used. Quite predictable.

Incidentally, this article is probably the first I've read by the New York Times' resident nuclear illiterate that doesn't contain major factual errors.

Link.

Investigate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

There has been a call from several anti-nuclear groups recently to investigate the NRC for heresy by thought, heresy by word, and heresy by deed "endangering" the "people of the United States," subverting "the democratic process," planning "at least 50 more nuclear plants," complacency in the installation of "substandard and defective parts," "limiting public participation" and "lowering standards" "to reduce construction costs," failure to require evacuation plans [which they do require -ed.], discriminating against the elderly, allowing the production of nuclear waste, "failing to regulate," "interfering" with whistleblowers, and endorsing the scandalous findings of that heretic Galileo.

Hey, if they can "investigate" anyone who disagrees with them as though they were criminals, why don't we start our own petition? Here are some charges I can think of off the top of my head:
1. Abrogating the responsibility of the government to defend its citizens from military attack by forcing nuclear power plant operators to hire small armies to defend their facilities;
2. Forcing nuclear power plant operators to file evacuation plans in response to postulated accidents that cannot happen;
3. Levying disproportionate fees;
4. Failing to regulate radioactive discharges from fossil fuel facilities;
5. Encouraging kludging and other bad engineering practices;
6. Recovering unnecessary costs from licensees and ratepayers;
7. Contributing to global warming by making the licensing process unnecessarily difficult;
8. Failing to consider reactor designs other than the light-water reactor;
9. Encouraging SLAPP lawsuits by anti-nuclear groups;
10. Preventing the beneficial use of byproduct material;
11. Failing to establish meaningful guidelines for the review of a reactor design;
12. Failing to accomodate integral fuel cycle facilities;
13. Requiring unnecessary components that reduce maintainability and introduce additional accident precursors;
14. Establishing technical specifications that emphasize beating a failure probability over sound engineering;
15. Discouraging the construction of test and research reactors through excessive fees and requirements that apply only to operational reactors;
16. Interfering with the doctor-patient relationship;
17. Failing to assert its statutory authority over the environmental impact of nuclear power;
18. Replacing sound management with rules and people-proofing;
19. Punishing licensees for paperwork violations;
20. Requiring multiple reviews of identical safety considerations;
21. Failing to establish a federal standard for byproduct material disposition;
22. Failing to use cost-benefit analysis for public health issues.

Any others?

Working at the State Level

Open thread: ideas for more effectively working on state restrictions.

Anti-Nukes to Monitor Part Failures

According to this email alert, they're looking into a database to keep track of each reactor trip. That doesn't sound like it would be too hard to counter as a pro-nuclear group; a blog would work even better as a way to analyze it.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"But the UK has a potential solution. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) operates a spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield on the west coast of Wales, where it extracts uranium and plutonium. Should Amergen and Entergy become able to ship spent fuel rods from their U.S. nukes to Sellafield, what is now useless radwaste will be worth billions."

-Michael Steinberg

Is there something wrong with separating what is actually waste from unused nuclear fuel? Does making money from it make it bad?

BTW...Sellafield is in Cumbria...and Cumbria is in England, not Wales.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"These [decommissioning] funds are tax exempt so long as they are held by a state regulated utility. But when they transfer to non-regulated corporations like Amergen and Entergy, under present law they become taxable. So these corporations have been lobbying the IRS and Congress, so far unsuccessfully, to change the law so they won’t have to pay these taxes. They stand to avoid paying $1 billion in taxes should they succeed."

-Michael Steinberg

And...why should the IRS take money set aside by law for cleanup?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The sound waves penetrate the tank and the Helium Atoms are heated up and then they bounce into each other causing heat and get very hot by the agitation caused by the sound wave bombardment. This will make heat and with an interior of the tank coated with ceramic coating it will get really hot and stay hot, that heat can then be used to run a coil through the center filled with water which will be your basic steam generator on the exterior, which spins an electric motor. Therefore any power lost from the transmission line is recaptured and therefore there is no loss.

These little tanks can be placed on the ground, prevent that horrible noise that [expletive deleted] of [sic] people and hurts the wild life and disorients them from their normal and natural life cycles and daily patterns. The heat is used, the sound is used and we all win. If you have an idea, which is similar or based upon a similar concept, then maybe you should join a group of thinkers who do not close their minds, turn them off, think out side the box and would like to meet people like you."

-Power Lines Should Never Be Wasted

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"It is necessary that such a research will be undertaken by scientists independent of industrials. This is not the case today, the assessments of the Chernobyl disaster reach us only through the filter of powerful pronuclear organizations."

-Commission de Recherche et d'Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité

Pro-nuclear, meaning anyone who does not have a pre-existing political agenda to kill off nuclear power?
And the idea that pro-nuclear organizations--not the industry, whose agenda is to ensure that their paychecks keep coming, but pro-nuclear organizations, whose agenda is the promotion of nuclear technology--are powerful is ludicrous. For example, if NIOF were to send a representative to the WNA Symposium in September (which we're considering doing, only to suggest that the industry not step on our toes or put their feet in their mouths while we try to organize students), we would have serious problems putting an airline ticket together. We as a movement have skilled people to a certain extent, but we're not rich by any means and aren't organized politically. The power is in the politically savvy, well-organized, litigious, and vicious anti-nuclear movement and its allies in the renewables (and to a lesser extent, the fossil fuel) industries.