Relocation for Natives on Bayou Island?

Randy Verdun (in maroon T-shirt), chief of the Bayou Lafourche Band of the Biloxi-Chitimachas, at meeting of federal and Louisiana emergency and relief officialsReznet Photo by Victor Merina

September 21, 2008

By Victor Merina

POINTE AU CHENE, La.—With floodwaters finally receding and shelters largely emptied, residents of hurricane-scarred bayou communities have returned home in earnest to clean up the damages left behind by Gustav and Ike.

The back-to-back hurricanes brought wind and water damage to many homes along this coastal belt including low-lying neighborhoods populated by Louisiana’s Native tribes.

Members of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, the Isle de Jean Charles and Lafourche bands of the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation and the United Houma Nation were among the hardest hit by Gustav, which struck on Labor Day. Ike followed 10 days later. Even though it made landfall in Texas more than 170 miles away, the south wind and churning waters swamped the bayou communities with floods and surging sea levels that engulfed entire neighborhoods and turned roadways into waterways.

“The two hurricanes really hit our people hard,” said Charles “Chuckie” Verdin, chief of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, which has about 700 members in the area. “But they’re slowly beginning to recover.

“Almost everybody got wind damage from Gustav,” he added. “The waters then came up for Ike and it has stayed that way for days so everyone has some water damage now.”

‘Worse Than I Thought’

Verdin and other local tribal leaders took local, state and federal officials last week through the stricken areas of the Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes that included the communities of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Montague and Isle de Jean Charles.

Some officials, like Mark Ford, the executive director of the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, were making their first visit into the region.

“It was worse than I thought,” Ford said as he surveyed the damage from the passenger seat in Verdin’s truck.

As he rode slowly through the neighborhoods, he could see the torn roofs and buildings ripped apart by Hurricane Gustav. Some houses were piles of rubble. Others, lashed by Hurricane Ike, still stood several feet in water from the storm surges and overflowing bayous that had crested the banks and flooded low-lying houses and remained deep enough on the road to prevent many people from reaching their homes.

Emily Pitre, a member of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, told the gathering of officials who came to her neighborhood, that she couldn’t get to her house for days because of the flooded roads and then only by boat. She said that at one point her son described their community in a different way.

“He said, ‘It’s like we’re in Venice, like we’re in a gondola. Let’s call it Gondola City,’ ” she said.

Complaints to Officials

Pitre was among those residents who complained to officials — including representatives of Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals — that the standing water had turned brackish, stagnant and unhealthy. And in some communities, free tetanus shots are being offered to residents.

At one point during the sightseeing trip, the truck carrying Ford, the governor’s aide, stopped near a local general store up the bayou as people came out to distribute water bottles. One smiling man walked to the truck window to exchange pleasantries with Verdin before being introduced to Ford.

“What did you see down there?” the man asked as he handed over a water bottle.

“A mess,” Ford replied, and the succinct answer erased the smile from the man’s face as he slowly shook his head.

The destruction left behind by the twin hurricanes could be seen on Pointe-aux-Chenes, which includes rows of homes on both sides of the bayou. But it was especially clear on Isle de Jean Charles, the island home of fewer than 100 families, where the lone access road connecting the strip of land to the mainland took visitors into a scene of broken homes, twisted buildings and seas of mud.

“There were a number of houses destroyed and more suffering major damage,” said Albert Naquin, chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimachas.

Naquin’s brother, Pierre, stood on the balcony of his island home and said he and his wife Marilyn were among the fortunate few whose house suffered some roof damage but was left largely untouched by the avalanche of water. “We were one of the lucky ones,” he said

An Uncertain Future

For now, in addition to the massive clean-up and rebuilding campaign, the question for the islanders is what to do in the future.

Naquin and the others at the meeting, including Terrebonne Parish President Michel Claudet, pushed the idea of relocating the permanent residents — who are virtually all Native Americans — to another place away from the perils of hurricanes and the floods they bring. It was an idea supported by Albert Naquin and the other chiefs at the meeting.

“We don’t want to relocate them but there is nothing else we can do,” said Claudet of the island residents. “It’s a step in the right direction.”

While the conversation swirled around whether to make such relocation mandatory, Randy Verdun, chief of the Bayou Lafourche Band of the Biloxi-Chitimachas, said any such scenario involving the islanders would have to be weighed carefully.

“The only way we will do it is as a unit so we can keep the community intact,” he said.

One notable tribal leader who was not at the meeting but met the government officials later in the day, decried those pushing for any mandatory relocation and said any such plan would have to be voluntary.

“It should be up to the island people to decide what they want to do,” said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the United Houma Nation, which counts some of the residents of Isle de Jean Charles as its members. “You can’t force them to relocate.”

Houma Relief Center

During their visit to the Houma chief in Raceland, La., Ford and the other government officials were able to see first-hand how the Houma tribe is assisting Natives victimized by the storms. They met with tribal council members and walked through an old general store that had been converted into a relief center packed with food, diapers, cleaning supplies and other goods donated by the Red Cross, Wal-Mart, Second Harvest and others. They also were told of relief supplies going out into the community.

Ford said he was impressed with the relief efforts of the Houma and their organized response to the crisis among its 17,000 members. He also said the visits to Pointe-aux-Chenes and the island were important to meet tribal leaders of the smaller tribes and to visit those communities first-hand.

“It was important to actually be there and see how some people are ready to move and some want to stay [in the community],” he said.

Ford added that it was also important to let the Native community know that officials in government “are listening and some of us really care and want to help.”

Victor Merina is reznet’s senior correspondent and special projects editor. A former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and finalist for the Pulitizer Prize, he also is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. Merina is a visiting faculty member at The Poynter Institute, where he leads seminars on cross-cultural reporting and writing about race.

Deactivating Radioactive Waste

Deactivating Radioactive Waste
Mag. Werner Sommer, PR und Kommunikation Technische Universität Wien 22.09.2008

Photo 1: Helmut Leeb

Photo 2: Erwin Jericha

The disposal of radioactive waste is often mentioned as an unsolved problem when it comes to using nuclear energy. A particular subject matter of many controversies and discussions is the isolation from the environment, an isolation that should be guaranteed for millions of years. If the duration of the necessary isolation can be diminished, we could this way “eliminate” the waste. Nuclear physicists of the Vienna University of Technology (TU) are researching, as part of a consortium represented in the entire Europe, the interaction of neutrons with relevant materials for the purpose of building an appropriate facility for the transmutation of dangerous residues. These results are the necessary basis for the development of facilities that would process radioactive waste. At the end of September 2008, the operations at the upgraded n_TOF facility at CERN will be resumed.

Vienna (TU) – In order to decrease the isolation time for radioactive waste, first of all, the actinides – elements whose nuclei are heavier than uranium (i.e. curium, actinium) – must be removed from the waste by processing (transmutation) into short-lived nuclei. “The core concept of transmutation – which was formulated as early as mid 20th century – consists of irradiating the actinides by fast neutrons. The highly stimulated nuclei that are generated this way suffer a fission, which leads to relatively short-lived nuclei, which in turn rapidly disintegrate into stable isotopes. Then, they cease to be radioactive,” explains Professor Helmut Leeb from the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities. Thus, the required radioactive waste isolation time of several millions years could be decreased to 300 and up to 500 years. The technological progress made in the last decades has made the transmutation possible at the industrial level.

An efficient transmutation of radioactive waste requires the development of new facilities. In addition to specially designed fast reactors, the Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) present a new potential concept. This is an undercritical reactor, which cannot sustain any chain reaction. The neutrons necessary for stationary operations are supplied by a proton accelerator with a spallation target located in the reactor core. “During the spallation, the atomic nuclei of the target (mainly lead) are broken with high-energy protons, while a large number of neutrons are normally released, neutrons which are necessary for the stationary operation of the reactor. If the accelerator is turned off, the chain reaction ceases,” added Leeb. Worldwide studies are based on the assumption that at least two decades will be necessary to transfer this concept to the industrial level, a concept which is fully understood at the scientific level.

An essential prerequisite for this development is a thorough knowledge of the neutrons’ interaction and reactions with other materials as available to date. Therefore, in the year 2000, the n_Tof facility became operative at CERN (Genf), which is a unique facility in the world, suitable especially for measuring the reactions of radioactive materials when bombarded with neutrons. Between 2002 and 2005, a large number of radiative captures and fission reactions, previously insufficiently known, were measured as part of an EU project, in which nuclear physicists from TU Vienna were considerably involved. After the conditional pause occasioned by the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, now at the end of September 2008, the consortium will start the operations at the upgraded n_TOF facility with a new target. The first series of experiments are neutron radiative captures on iron and nickel, which are analyzed by Viennese nuclear physicists (from TU Vienna and the University of Vienna). In addition to accurate reaction data for transmutation facilities, the results are also of interest for Astrophysics.

An alternative nuclear fuel, which leads to a reduced incidence of radioactive waste, is the “thorium-uranium cycle.” Leeb: “Thorium is a potential nuclear fuel, which may be incubated into a light uranium isotope, whose fission generates basically no actinide. Furthermore, thorium can be found approximately five times more often than uranium. However, special reactors must be still developed for this, reactors that would be appropriate for the reaction pattern and for the somewhat harder gamma radiation. India is one of the countries that already host experiments with thorium in reactor cores.

For further inquiries, you may contact:
Associate Professor Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Helmut Leeb
The Atomic Institute of Austrian Universities
Vienna University of Technology
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 8-10/E141, A-1040 Vienna
Telephone: +43/1/58801-14258
Fax: +43/1/58801-14299
E-mail: helmut.leeb@tuwien.ac.at

Spokesperson:
Mag. Daniela Hallegger
TU Vienna – PR and Communication
Karlsplatz 13/E011, A-1040 Vienna
Telephone: +43/1/58801-41027
Fax: +43/1/58801-41093
E-mail: daniela.hallegger@tuwien.ac.at
Website: http://www.tuwien.ac.at

Weitere Informationen:

http://Fotodownload: https://www.tuwien.ac.at/index.php?id=7983

http://Link: http://cern.ch/n_TOF/

Buy a French reactor and get lifetime fuel: Envoy

With competition hotting up for India’s $100 billion nuclear pie, French Ambassador Jeremy Bonnafonte on Thursday assured New Delhi fuel supplies for the full life of a nuclear reactor it buys from his country.

The French envoy, however, clarified that the sale of enrichment and reprocessing technologies was not covered by the Indo-French Nuclear Framework Agreement which is awaiting signature. The two countries may have to sign another agreement for this purpose, he added.

France is open to such sales but they will depend upon any worldwide consensus the NSG reaches on the issue, he said.

If India buys a reactor from France India can obtain nuclear fuel for the full life of such a reactor, that is, 40 or 50 years, Bonnafonte told Karan Thapar in an interview to be broadcast on India Tonight programme of CNBC-TV18.

The categorical assurance by France seeks to put fuel supply anxieties in India at rest and may set a precedent for companies from other countries who will be doing nuclear business with India in the days to come.

The envoy also stressed that the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group has given India a clean waiver which placed neither any restriction on fuel supplies to India not any curbs on its right to build strategic reserves.

The envoy confirmed that the India-France civil nuclear agreement was ready to be signed, but no decision has been made on whether it will be inked during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Paris Sept 30. The date of signing will be decided by the two heads of government, he added.

“Only small procedural matters remain. But these will not be obstacles to signing,” he said. Hinting at hesitancy on India’s part, Bonnafonte underlined that France was keen to sign the nuclear pact as soon as possible.

The envoy confirmed that France will grant India reprocessing rights provided New Delhi fulfils the IAEA safeguards conditions and sets up a facility for this purpose.

Making a pitch for a slice of India’s $100 billion nuclear business at stake, he said France was keen to sell the new generation Areva reactor, which is said to be the most advanced in the world.

Insisting that the NSG has given a clean waiver to India, the envoy rejected reports about an informal secret NSG understanding among members of the cartel to ban the sale of enrichment and reprocessing technologies.

He also repudiated a report by Nucleonics Week that the NSG only granted a waiver after the US made it clear it would terminate all nuclear commerce with India in the event of New Delhi conducting a test. He says no such assurance was given or needed.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=7297c15c-122b-4fcd-ab46-e4df306a134a&ParentID=00269240-e391-46e6-9093-1d2744e222ad&&Headline=Buy+our+reactor+and+get+lifetime+N-fuel%3a+France

Nuclear plant moves waste to tackle leaks

By Greg Clary
The Journal News • September 22, 2008

BUCHANAN – Workers have removed spent nuclear fuel rods from Indian Point 1 and expect to drain 500,000 gallons of radioactive water from the dead reactor’s storage pool by the end of the year.

The move should end strontium 90 contamination at the plant, company and regulatory officials say.

“We’ve said from the beginning that an essential part of the strategy for reducing additional contamination was removing the fuel and draining the pool,” said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“It’s believed to be the primary source of strontium contamination at the site.”

Indian Point is the only nuclear site in the country that is leaking strontium 90, a highly radioactive isotope.

Sheehan said Indian Point 1, which operated from 1962 to 1974, has had a long history of leakage, and plant officials had thought a curtain drain system around the huge pool was catching any radioactive water and directing it to proper disposal points.

Another leak, of less radioactive tritium, was found at Indian Point 2 in August 2005, and as the company drilled dozens of new monitoring wells, strontium 90 started showing up in high levels.

Company officials are confident Indian Point 1 is the source of the strontium 90 because when they began filtering out 98 percent of the isotope from the spent fuel pool, the levels in nearby wells dropped quickly.

“The sooner they remove that source, the better,” Sheehan said.

By the end of the year, Indian Point officials expect to have diluted the 500,000 gallons and released them into the Hudson River according to federally permitted procedures set up to protect the surrounding habitat.

On Friday, the last load of 32 fuel rods – a fifth of the 160 moved – was carried in a dry cask storage canister by a tank-like machine aptly named “The Crawler.”

A team of 16 people worked to transport the spent fuel from the reactor to a storage pad about a quarter-mile away, where the Crawler lowered the 125-ton canister into its designated spot.

“It’s still spent fuel; let’s be clear,” Chris English, superintendent of Indian Point 1, said as he watched the move. “But it’s not as active as fresh fuel coming out of an active reactor.”

Only about 10 percent of the rods’ fuel – burned to create electricity – is used up during the process, leaving potential energy sitting in the canisters for as long as it takes until the remaining radioactive isotopes decay or other options are developed.

“Future generations are going to come to pick this stuff up and say: ‘What the heck were they thinking?’” English said. “Because there’s a lot of value here.”

Until then, however, it’s considered nuclear waste and will remain onsite until the federal government builds the Yucca Mountain’s repository or an alternate.

Though France and other countries are recycling nuclear waste using a method called reprocessing, there are no U.S. facilities doing that and little movement to do it here.

“This is a big milestone for us,” said Donald Mayer, the Entergy Nuclear official in charge of Indian Point’s efforts to control the groundwater contamination. “What this ultimately does is take all of (the strontium 90) away.”

Reach Greg Clary at gclary@lohud.com or 914-696-8566.

Green with envy: Waste-disposal problem cannot simply be buried

When it comes to waste, the United States has a history of literally burying its problems — a practice that is a shortcut rather than a solution.

While many waste solutions place the problem underground because it’s a convenient storage space, it also encourages an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. While shoving the waste aside for the short term is convenient, ignoring the long term invites more trouble in the future.

Landfills are solid-waste depositories where waste is put in a plastic- and clay-lined cavity in the ground, compacted and covered with soil daily and capped and covered with two feet of soil and vegetation. When a landfill runs out of space and closes, it’s common to turn it into a golf course or ski slope.

Landfills have redeeming qualities — for example, the methane emitted from the cells of trash can be harnessed as electricity — but that doesn’t completely offset the negative effects of burying the problem. Because the waste is beneath the surface, we can’t see that the cells of trash are so tightly compacted and void of oxygen that biodegradation is occurring very slowly. When a carrot is still orange on the inside after 10 years, that’s a sign the process is barely inching along.

While using a closed landfill for recreational activity reuses the acreage, it has the simultaneous effect of removing the issue of waste disposal from the public consciousness. The landscape doesn’t illustrate all the trash we create, and it neglects to address what happens when we run out of underground space for our waste. The next step is probably to send it to the developing world with our e-waste.

Nuclear power has the same obstacle in respect to waste disposal. Nuclear power plants generate electricity using nuclear fission — splitting an atom into two — to heat water into steam that drives a turbine generator.

The process of nuclear fission results in the creation of low-level and high-level radioactive waste. Equipment or clothing that has been contaminated is classified as low-level, while used nuclear reactor fuel is labeled as high-level.

Low-level waste takes hundreds of years to reach safe levels of radiation, while high-level radioactive waste won’t reach safe levels for tens of thousands of years. After being monitored and cooled for several years, it is transported and placed in concrete structures.

Nuclear waste disposal is a concrete (no pun intended) and current topic that needs to be discussed by the people who are so adamant about its promise. Some propose burying the radioactive waste deep underground in places like Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the problem is that Nevada residents aren’t clamoring to have such waste in their backyards or seeping into their groundwater.

Carbon sequestration is another example of diverting the byproducts of our consumption underground. Carbon sequestration can be either underground or terrestrial, but the idea is to inject the carbon released by facilities like coal-fired power plants into the ground to be absorbed by soil or trees or to remain isolated from the atmosphere.

Soil and trees can only hold so much carbon dioxide, and the process of sequestering carbon actually uses more energy, with coal-fired power plants using more coal to fuel the sequestration, according to Science News. While carbon emissions went down, nitrogen and sulfur oxide emissions increased.

Although carbon sequestration is a thoughtful attempt to try to deal with carbon dioxide, it is a short-sighted one that operates on the idea that there is an unlimited space for the byproducts of human consumption. Like many of the ideas for waste disposal, it operates under the pretense that eliminating the problem from sight will eliminate any of its side effects.

The answers are out there, but as always, they needed to be recognized, researched and developed — which takes funding. Renewable energy is within reach, composting already exists and simply reducing waste and energy use individually doesn’t hurt either. It’s irresponsible to rely on burying our problems today knowing that future generations will be haunted by them and forced to fix them tomorrow.

Cathy Wilson is a senior studying journalism. Send her an e-mail at cw136607@ohiou.edu.

Nuclear case hinges on waste

Monday, September 22, 2008

Every form of energy generation, including nuclear power, has shortcomings and advantages. But a fair comparison of electricity-generation options is now generating a growing consensus that our nation should expand its nuclear-power capacity.

That consensus extends to both major-party presidential candidates. It also extends to our state, where we generate roughly half of the electricity we need, though we don’t use all of it, instead, sending some of it to other states. That’s much more than the rate for the nation, which gets about a fifth of its electricity from nuclear.

Our S.C. congressional delegation strongly supports nuclear power. Third District Republican Rep. Gresham Barrett, along with former U.S. Energy Secretary and S.C. Gov. James Edwards, came to North Charleston last week to tout his energy legislation that would facilitate an expansion of nuclear power. Both later visited this newspaper for the same cause.

Rep. Barrett, citing Department of Energy estimates, told us: “If we don’t increase our base load, it’s not a question of if we run out of power, it’s a question of when.”

But raising the nuclear output depends on “when” we resolve the critical issue of waste disposal. Rep. Barrett contends that technological advances have eased that problem to a degree, now that 90 percent — or more — of nuclear waste can be reprocessed. But there’s still the question of what to do with the waste that remains.

Washington long ago promised to provide a suitable disposal site for the waste and even charge utilities a fee to establish a fund for that purpose. That promise has not been kept.

The logical, overdue course would be to open the nuclear-waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, which experts have long identified as the safest possible site for that purpose. Unfortunately, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other opponents continue to block that path.

Rep. Barrett said of the waste issue: “This is not only a liability for these nuclear plants but a national-security risk.”

Failing to prudently utilize a relatively safe form of electricity is also a national-security risk in light of our dangerous dependence on foreign energy sources.

Gov. Edwards, who was a nuclear advocate as Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of Energy, expressed long-term frustration at our nation’s reluctance to reap nuclear energy’s benefits. He warned: “If we don’t do it now, we never will.” While some environmentalists have warmed up to nuclear power, in large part because it emits virtually no greenhouse gases, others still oppose it. Rep. Barrett issued this fair challenge: “If they don’t think this is the route to go, then tell me, is coal-fired the route to go?”

Those who answer that we can satisfy our electricity needs without building more coal or nuclear plants ignore energy-demand reality. Yes, conservation is an essential step toward solving our energy problems. So is the development of alternative energy sources.

But so is increasing domestic energy production. Generating electricity with nuclear power appears preferable to generating it by burning fossil fuels — if the waste problem can be solved.

Our federal lawmakers recognize that reality. Rep. Barrett cites the support of two powerful House Democrats from our state — Majority Whip James Clyburn and Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt.

Bipartisan support will be required to advance the case for nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal. Congress can’t allow parochial interests on the waste issue to prevail.

http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/sep/22/nuclear_case_hinges_on_waste55337/