DOE: Expand Yucca Mountain or plan new site

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BRATTLEBORO – The secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy told the president and Congress on Tuesday that the time is now to act on either expanding a proposed nuclear waste facility in Nevada or developing a second site.”The Secretary of Energy recommends that Congress act promptly to remove the statutory limit … and defer a decision regarding the need for a second repository,” stated Samuel Bodman.

The facility was authorized by Congress for the storage of 70,000 metric tons of waste, he wrote.

http://www.reformer.com/ci_11203316

DOE set to fine Hanford contractor Bechtel $385,000

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The Department of Energy plans to fine Bechtel National $385,000 over repeated quality problems at Hanford’s vitrification plant.

The contractor designing and constructing the plant has had numerous opportunities to correct problems in the ordering and manufacturing of piping to be used in black cells, Martha Thompson, acting director of the DOE Office of Health, Safety and Security’s Office of Enforcement, wrote in a letter to Bechtel on Wednesday.

The largest portion of the fine, $220,000, will be for failing to improve quality. The remainder of the fine will cover problems related to the piping, such as what DOE found to be inadequate work procedures and design problems

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/kennewick_pasco_richland/story/405281.html

DOE receives little community support at meeting

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The U.S. Department of Energy didn’t get a lot of community support Tuesday at a public hearing to discuss its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Program.

The program, referred to as GNEP, would, at its most basic level, allow for research and development of the recycling of spent nuclear fuel rods. At its most active level, the program could include advanced nuclear recycling using advanced recycling reactors.

The meeting was conducted in Piketon, where a GNEP program could be implemented in the future. The DOE already owns land and has facilities that would be good for recycling, and is one of many DOE sites being considered.

http://www.chillicothegazette.com/article/20081203/NEWS01/812030307

DOE would expand nuclear dump in Nevada

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The Energy Department will tell Congress in the coming weeks it should begin looking for a second permanent site to bury nuclear waste, or approve a large expansion of the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Edward Sproat, head of the department’s civilian nuclear waste program, said Thursday the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere in the country.

The future of the Yucca Mountain project is anything but certain.

http://www.hanfordnews.com/news/2008/story/12495.html

DOE says K-25 structure can’t be saved

By Frank Munger (Contact)
Originally published 11:47 a.m., October 21, 2008
Updated 11:47 a.m., October 21, 2008

OAK RIDGE – It looks like K-25, one of the jewels of the World War II Manhattan Project, will be demolished – in its entirety.

A Department of Energy official said today federal officials have concluded that saving the building’s North Tower, as proposed by preservationists, would be “next to impossible” and would “cost many millions of dollars more than we anticipated.”

Steve McCracken, DOE’s environmental manager in Oak Ridge, said federal officials are asking preservation groups to come up with other alternatives that would “meaningfully” recognize the uranium-enrichment mission at the Oak Ridge site and its World War II and Cold War accomplishments without salvaging the structure itself.

In 2003, DOE signed a memorandum of understanding with preservation groups in which the federal agency promised to save a portion of the structure and turn it over to a non-government entity, which would be charged with converting it into an interpretative center and museum of Oak Ridge history.

McCracken said no decision would be final until DOE meets with the signatories of the MOU and attempts to iron out a new agreement that doesn’t include saving a piece of the deteriorated building. No date is set for such a meeting, but he said DOE would like to give a final plan on K-25 to its cleanup contractor – Bechtel Jacobs Co. – by the spring of 2009.

Preservation groups spearheaded by Bill Wilcox, a Manhattan Project veteran and the city’s historian, earlier this year proposed a compromise alternative that involved saving only a portion of K-25′s North Tower. Wilcox said the projected cost of that plan would be about $29 million, not much greater than DOE’s estimate for demolition.

However, McCracken said today the costs appear to be prohibitive and the dangers to workers too great to salvage the old building.

More details at they develop online and in Wednesday’s News Sentinel

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/oct/21/doe-says-k-25-structure-cant-be-saved/

DOE Wants To Build Railroad To Yucca Mountain

DOE Wants To Build Railroad To Yucca Mountain

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Also on KTNV.com 4,000 Sign Petition Against Yucca Mountain Sen. Harry Reid Protests Yucca Mountain

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A new railroad could run right through Southern Neva

da toward Yucca Mountain.

The Department of Energy announced Friday its intentions to build a rail line from Caliente to the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain.

The decision opens the plan to legal challenges from the state and other opponents of the plan.

http://www.ktnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=9162653Farmers and ranchers will also be able to use the railroad.

DOE to build system to treat ground water plume at Hanford

By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer

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HANFORD — The Department of Energy is preparing to build Hanford’s largest water treatment system to clean up one of Hanford’s most problematic underground plumes of contaminated water.

It has signed a record of decision with it regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology, committing to the cleanup work, DOE announced Thursday.

“Pulling this contaminated water out of the ground and treating it is critical to preventing contamination in Hanford’s central plateau from traveling toward the Columbia River,” Dave Brockman, manager of DOE’s Hanford Richland Operations Office, said in a statement.

Underneath most of the 200 West Area in central Hanford lies a 5-square-mile plume of ground water contaminated with carbon tetrachloride. Contamination from the chemical used as a solvent in plutonium processing facilities has been measured in concentrations as high as 1,000 times the amount allowed in drinking water.

In addition portions of the ground water beneath the 200 West Area also are contaminated with trichloroethylene, chromium, nitrate and radioactive technetium 99, iodine 129 and tritium.

DOE is planning to build Hanford’s largest pump and treat station at a cost of $174 million to attack the contaminants and clean the water.

The system will require drilling more than 50 wells to pump contaminated water out of the ground or return cleaned water to the ground. The new system, with multiple treatment units, will have a throughput of more than 1,600 gallons per minute. The cleaned water then can be returned to the ground.

Work on designing the new system has started, and initial estimates call for bringing the system online in two to three years.

It will replace a smaller treatment system installed in the 1990s as a stop-gap measure to prevent carbon tetrachloride from spreading. The smaller system has treated about 1 million gallons of ground water, removing about 12 tons of carbon tetrachloride.

The new system is expected to remove 95 percent of the contaminants in the plume beneath the 200 West Area within 25 years. The remaining contaminants are expected to naturally reduce over the next 100 years.

“This does represent a commitment to a long-term problem at Hanford,” said Dave Einan, EPA environmental engineer. “We’re glad to see it.”

Most of the contamination in the 200 West Area ground water is from liquid waste from processing plants, such as T Plant and the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. The waste was poured into the soil in disposal cribs from 1945 to the early 1970s, and the more mobile contaminants reached the ground water.

An estimated 800 to 1,000 tons of carbon tetrachloride were included in the discharges, making the contaminated ground water beneath the 200 West Area, officially called the 200-ZP-1 operable unit, one of DOE’s most problematic plumes.

The plume is large and the concentration is high. But in addition, carbon tetrachloride adds complexity to the cleanup because it is heavier than water, Einan said. While some contaminants stay within the upper inches of an underground aquifer, carbon tetrachloride tends to sink, according to DOE.

“So not only is it 5 miles wide, it is also a deep contaminant,” said Geoff Tyree, DOE spokesman. “It is more difficult to go deeper into the ground water for this contaminant.”

DOE to temporarily close waste processing center

By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer

The Department of Energy plans to shut down Hanford’s Waste Receiving and Processing Facility early in 2009 for an undetermined length of time.

The temporary shutdown is part of a plan announced by DOE in March to start sending some Hanford waste to the Idaho National Laboratory for processing and then shipment for disposal at a national repository in New Mexico.

About 1,000 drums of radioactive Hanford waste that would otherwise be processed at Hanford will be sent to Idaho in an initial campaign. DOE plans call for about 9,000 of the drums eventually to be sent to Idaho.

About 40 people at the Waste Receiving and Processing Facility, or WRAP, would be affected, according to DOE.

But because the work will be paid for out of the Hanford budget, sending the shipments to Idaho will not mean a decrease in Hanford jobs next year, said Dave Brockman, manager of the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office.

Money saved on processing the waste can be used for other Hanford work, such as retrieving drums of waste temporarily buried in trenches in central Hanford, Brockman said.

“The goal is to focus on retrieval,” he said “The big reduction in risk comes when we get it out of the ground.”

In the ’70s and ’80s, waste potentially contaminated with plutonium was temporarily buried at Hanford until the nation opened a national repository for transuranic waste in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP. At Hanford, transuranic waste is typically laboratory equipment, protective clothing and other debris contaminated with plutonium.

DOE plans to send 55-gallon drums of waste to Idaho that already have been placed inside 85-gallon overpacks because they were severely corroded when they were retrieved from the ground.

The drums picked for shipment will include only those free of waste, such as aerosol cans, that are not approved for shipping or acceptance at WIPP. Those drums have to be repacked manually at Hanford.

The overpacked drums can be compacted at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Facility in Idaho, which can compress several 55-gallon drums into a 100-gallon drum.

The process is faster and more efficient than handling the drums at Hanford and the result will be drums that make better use of limited repository space at WIPP, according to DOE.

At Hanford, WRAP is expected to be placed on cold standby starting in February or March while Hanford workers focus on the Idaho shipping campaign. The 51,300 square-foot facility in central Hanford is used for inspecting, treating and repackaging drums and small boxes of low-level radioactive waste mixed with hazardous chemicals and for processing transuranic waste.

From a control room, an employee characterizes the contents of drums by using an x-ray and measuring radioactivity. Once characterization is finished, the drum is labeled and prepared for transportation for permanent disposal.

http://www.tri-cityherald.com/kennewick_pasco_richland/story/317138.html

DOE shifts gears on nuke site

WASHINGTON – The federal government’s plans to bring a so-called nuclear waste recycling facility to the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon appear to be put on hold, possibly for good.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would not select a site for the planned reprocessing facility, as expected.

In a notice published July 10, the department said it had received 14,000 comments on the controversial Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, called GNEP, a Bush administration plan to deal with the nation’s spent nuclear power plant fuel.

“As a result, DOE has eliminated the project-specific proposals for the siting, construction, and operation of a nuclear fuel recycling center, an advanced recycling center, and an advanced fuel cycle research facility,” the notice said.

Angela Hill, a spokeswoman for DOE, said the change of course doesn’t mean Piketon is off the list of 11 possible locations for the GNEP project, it just means that the list has been set aside.

“What we’re looking at is the larger, broader picture,” Hill said. “We’re not at the stage right now to pick a site.”

Supporters had touted the plan as a boon for the economically depressed Piketon region that would create thousands of jobs. Opponents claimed the proposed recycling facility was a ruse and that the government’s real intentions were to turn Piketon into a storage facility for nuclear waste.

Hill said the department plans to release its environmental impact statement for GNEP in the next month. If that report is approved, the Energy secretary would decide whether to allow spent nuclear fuel to be recycled, something that is not yet done in the U.S. After that decision, a site selection process could commence, she said.

What does that mean?

“GNEP is dead,” said Geoffrey Sea, an activist with the Southern Ohio Neighbors Group who campaigned against the project. “It’s all code language for saying that this isn’t going to happen.”

The notice came after the House Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development decided in June not to fund the project in next year’s budget.

In a news release, subcommittee Chairman Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., characterized GNEP as being “counterproductive, poorly designed and poorly executed.”

Sea said the 5,000 Ohioans who signed the group’s petition and 300 residents who showed up at a March 2007 field hearing on the proposed facility – along with the lack of funding – helped knock the site list off the table.

His group also threatened to sue the Energy Department if the agency moved forward with plans to award grants to Piketon and two other locations so they could undergo site characteristic studies, he said.

Jim Morgan, director of nuclear operations for the Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative, referred to as SONIC, a community group that formed to support the project, said a lot of misinformation had been spread about the plant.

“That part was disappointing,” Morgan said, adding his group collected 2,200 letters of support for the project, which were forwarded to the Energy Department.

“The biggest issue is that GNEP had lost a lot of its impetus within Congress,” he said.

Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican from Miami Township who had supported the proposal, was attacked for her position during the 2006 election by Democrat Victoria Wulsin, who again is challenging Schmidt in the 2nd Congressional District.

Schmidt said through a spokesman she continues to support the project.

“The congresswoman’s position has been that she will do what the local community wants her to do. If they want her to push for the consideration of this project, then she will,” Bruce Pfaff said.

“Congress has not provided much funding for this project, so she has been focusing much of her attention on making sure the cleaning continues,” he said.

Keith Dailey, a spokesman for Gov. Ted Strickland, who worked on issues regarding the Piketon plant in Congress when his district had included the area, said the governor wasn’t surprised at the department’s announcement.

“There was a sense of uncertainty about it for some time,” Dailey said. “The governor did support the community’s efforts to attract this project. But there were certain conditions that the community felt were necessary for the recycling plant. They were seeking a commitment that this site would not become a nuclear dumping ground.”

So what does this mean for Piketon?

Strickland would continue to advocate on behalf of the site, Dailey said.

“The governor thinks that this location and the highly-skilled work force in the area are great assets to the state,” he said.

The big unknown, however, is what the next president – whether it’s Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama – will push for with regard to the handling of spent nuclear fuel.

“They punted the ball down the field,” said Sea, who opposed the project. “This administration is not going to figure out anything and all of this is going to be left to the next administration. So, all options are open.”

http://www.chillicothegazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080810/NEWS01/808100303

DOE sued over uranium leases

By Dick Kamp
Wick Communications Environmental Liaison
Published/Last Modified on Saturday, August 2, 2008 8:27 PM MDT

DENVER —  A newly filed lawsuit accuses the Department of Energy of violating federal law during agency approval of uranium leases in the Uravan mining district in Montrose, Mesa and San Miguel counties.

Durango-based Energy Minerals Law Center and Western Mining Action Project in Lyons sued DOE’s Office of Legacy Management in Denver’s U.S. District Court Thursday for failure to follow the National Environmental Policy Act in assessing the environmental impacts of nearly tripling uranium mining leases to over 27,000 acres of land.

“The department has received the complaint and intends to review it carefully,” DOE spokeswoman Joann Wardrip said of the suit.

The suit argues that granting the leases with improper NEPA review, including 6,600

acres of leases to Montrose County-based Energy Fuels Inc., ignores the cumulative impacts of past, present and potential uranium contamination.

The suit also claims the DOE failed to discuss impacts from the proposed Energy Fuels Resources Piñon Ridge uranium mill in the Paradox Valley,  as well as the White Mesa, Utah mill and Canon City mill (currently not operated).

Energy Fuels Resources President and CEO George Glasier said he wasn’t sure how it would be possible for the DOE to discuss impacts at Piñon Ridge.

“We hadn’t even announced the Piñon Ridge Mill at the time the DOE closed the process,” he said. “That’s an interesting question, but how could the DOE do it when they didn’t even know about it?”

Glasier said the mill is not dependent on the four leases it obtained from the DOE and there is limited capacity at the mill in any event.

“Our mill is being built whether we’ve got those leases or not.  … The impact won’t be any different. There’s a limited capacity at the mill. It doesn’t increase the impact by having DOE leases,” he said.

“We think the DOE did the proper review. I think the DOE will definitely prevail in the lawsuit.”

The suit alleges that other uranium leases, such as those on BLM land that are not under oversight by the DOE, will also increase due to the DOE program and impact the environment. It argues that these impacts must also be taken into consideration.

The plaintiffs further argue that the process of site cleanups, both waste and 5,000 tons of uranium ore stored at sites being overseen by the DOE, weren’t subjected to NEPA review to ensure the plans are adequate.

The federal court is asked to require the DOE halt the issuance of leases and start over. The plaintiffs ask the court to demand that DOE address the uranium leasing program — both issuance of new leases and the cleanup of old sites — through the NEPA process by doing proper environmental impact statements, or EIS. An EIS could result in an option of “no action” in the case of issuance of new leases.

The DOE Office of Legacy Management both oversees some portions of cleanup of old contaminated mill tailings as well as issuing leases for uranium mining as part of a 1954 program established by the federal government.

The purpose was to stop allowing certain uranium mining claims to be staked by private parties under the 1872 Mining Act.

Other uranium mines, including Energy Fuels mines being rehabilitated, are still staked on BLM land under the 1872 Act.

After the last uranium boom ended in the early 1980s, leasing declined but the DOE, with a hope of stimulating the industry, said in 2005 that it would re-open claims that were no longer active for new leasing.

Successful bids for 27,000 acres and 38 claims were announced in May and some leases were granted in June with more to be given in the coming months.

The DOE issued a “programmatic environmental assessment” for the uranium leases in June, 2007 determining that uranium mining would have “no significant impact” on the regional environment.

“The DOE’s actions defy logic for a program established to encourage the expansion of uranium mining when we all know the history of contamination and disease that existed in the past in the Uravan Mining district,” Jeffrey Parsons, attorney for the plaintiffs, said Thursday. “The legacy of uranium mining in Colorado has been devastating.”

Parsons said the whole purpose of NEPA was to assess cumulative environmental impacts in a region and, if it appeared as though there would be, to prepare an EIS on specific sites.

“You cannot do a good job at that until you look at a mine’s plan of operation, which they have not done. Thirty-eight mines on 27,000 acres are obviously going to have impacts, the Piñon Ridge mill will be dependent on these mines operating and the mill will have impacts; existing mills already have environmental impacts,” Parsons said.

He said the lawsuit should come as no surprise to the DOE, as the groups have been trying to get a remedy for almost two years.

“We also want them to work with BLM and EPA along with other federal agencies to develop a long-term leasing program based on assessing the cumulative impacts of uranium mining and milling in this region and each agency passes the buck and refuses to take responsibility for it,” he said.

“So, we are asking the court to intervene and to order the DOE Office of Legacy Management to do their job properly.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Denver-based INFORM, statewide Colorado Environmental Coalition, Denver Center for Native Ecosystems, and the national Center for Biological Diversity.

Daily Press Senior Writer Katharhynn Heidelberg contributed to this report.