Tag Archives: NRC

Obama’s atomic blunder

Posted on by

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not: pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.

The Southern Company, which wants to build these two new reactors, has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It’s not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs.

The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure rate for government-back reactor construction loans could be in excess of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the CBO’s report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees.

Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than $12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10 billion, well before a single construction license has been issued, which will take at least a year.

Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing ten times as many permanent jobs.

Georgia has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they’re being built. Florida and Georgia are among a small handful of states taxing electric consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and that may never deliver a single electron of electricity.

Two Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the US Senate), helped reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power & Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build double-reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they’ll postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County.

In 2005 the Bush Administration set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland and Texas appear to be next in line.

But the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse’s AP-1000 slated for Georgia’s Vogtle site, as well as for South Carolina and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has been challenged by regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain. In Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt.

Taxpayers are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Only $11 billion has been set aside to cover the cost of such a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for future accidents. Thus the “temporary” program could ultimately stretch out to a full century or more.

In the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to “investigate” the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America’s 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy’s Vermont Yankee, near the state’s southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk.

A furious statewide grassroots campaign aims to shut the plant, whose license expires in 2012. A binding agreement between Entergy and the state gives the legislature the power to deny an extension. US Senator Bernie Saunders (D-VY) has demanded the plant close. The legislature may vote on it in a matter of days.

Obama has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayer Institute, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Reactor backers hailing a “renaissance” in atomic energy studiously ignore France’s catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and 3 years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in the US.

The reactor industry has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan guarantees. There’s no doubt it will seek far more in the coming months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the question will be: In a tight economy, how much public money will Congress throw at this obsolete technology?

The potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious grassroots opposition to financing, licensing and construction of this and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee.

The “atomic renaissance” is still a very long way from going tangibly critical.

–
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.

“Clean” Nuclear Power? The President Knows Better

Posted on by

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama said that “(t)o create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Despite his statement, the President knows better.

Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean. There is no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn’t mean it’s “clean.” For years nuclear plants have been leaking radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites across the nation. Mr. Obama was prompted to address the issue when radioactive contamination was found in drinking wells and off the nuclear plant site at Exelon’s Braidwood nuclear plant.

In 2006, when the President was serving as a senator from Illinois, he introduced the Nuclear Release Notice Act to address the radioactive contamination of groundwater at several nuclear reactors in his state. Unfortunately, the bill never became law.

Rather than hold nuclear power plant owners accountable for the uncontrolled and unmonitored leaks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) handed the problem over to the nuclear industry’s lobbyists. Despite the fact that tritium releases to groundwater violate the terms of the nuclear plant’s license, the NRC has failed to exercise its regulatory authority. Instead, NRC has allowed the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) to create a voluntary industry program to deal with the tritium contamination.

Since then, the trickle of operators of nuclear plants acknowledging that they’ve contaminated the ground water at their sites has grown into a deluge. The nuclear plants that have admitted leaking radioactive hydrogen or tritium into the groundwater include: Braidwood, Byron & Dresden in Ilinois; Indian Point & Fitzpatrick in New York; Yankee Rowe & Pilgrim in Massachusetts; Three Mile Island & Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania; Callaway in Missouri; Oyster Creek in New Jersey; Hatch in Georgia; Palo Verde In Arizona; Perry in Ohio; Point Beach in Wisconsin; Salem in Delaware; Seabrook in New Hampshire; Watts Bar in Tennessee; Wolf Creek in Kansas; Connecticut Yankee and most recently Vermont Yankee. This NY Times article explains it all.

This list is likely incomplete and still growing. It remains difficult for the public to track which nuclear plants are leaking radioactive contamination because the NRC has failed to update its website since October of 2007 when it abdicated its authority to the industry’s voluntary initiative.

The President was then less than pleased with the industry’s voluntary regulation of radioactive leaks. Then Senator Obama responded that “(w)hile it’s encouraging that the nuclear industry recognizes it has a special responsibility to keep communities informed of tritium leaks, the voluntary guidelines recommended by the Nuclear Energy Institute would still allow tritium leaks to occur without the public ever finding out about it. The nuclear industry already has a voluntary policy, and it hasn’t worked.”

Obama’s comments now seem prophetic. Recently, just one week after the government regulators extended the operating license for the 40-year-old Oyster Creek reactor in New Jersey, the plant owner admitted leaking radioactive contamination into the plants ground water. This most recent revelation has prompted several members of Congress to ask the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the leaks and how regulators at the NRC have mishandled the issue.

According to Congressman Ed Markey, who over sees the NRC, “(u)nder current regulations, miles and miles of buried pipes within nuclear reactors have never been inspected and will likely never be inspected.” Markey concluded that “(t)his is simply unacceptable. As it stands, the NRC requires-at most-a single, spot inspection of the buried piping systems no more than once every 10 years. This cannot possibly be sufficient to ensure the safety of both the public and the plant.”

If President Obama truly wants a clean energy economy and the jobs that come with it, he should abandon the failed policies of the past. Nuclear power is a dirty and dangerous distraction from the clean energy future the President has promised America.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

A quiet but HUGE no nukes triumph

Posted on by
In the wake of Copenhagen, an unheralded but hard-fought No Nukes victory has moved us closer to a green-powered Earth.It has happened in upstate New York, where the Unistar Nuclear Energy front group asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to delay its application to build a reactor at Oswego, near Syracuse.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the San Antonio city council’s deliberations over building two new reactors has disintegrated into recriminations, resignations and firings over a multi-billion-dollar price jump in projected cost estimates, a furor that could doom reactor construction there as well. And in Vermont, Entergy has threatened to shut its Yankee reactor if the legislature does not approve a complex maneuver that would allow its owners to escape certain financial liabilities.

Throughout the US, while the corporate media hypes a “renaissance” of new nukes, facts on the ground say the opposite is happening. The longer that trend continues, the more likely we are to win a world powered by the Solartopian technologies that really work, including wind, solar, geothermal, sustainable bio-fuels, increased efficiency/conservation, and more.

The Oswego postponement stems from the successful national grassroots campaign sparked by NukeFree.org and others dating to late 2007. When the Bush Administration asked for $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors, a well coordinated campaign rose up, complete with a music video from Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, K’eb Mo and Ben Harper (www.nukefree.org). With help from key Congressional Democrats, a wide range of organizations and individuals rallied to get the $50 billion package out of proposed energy legislation. Grassroots opposition has since beaten the proposed guarantees two more times.

It is as yet unclear what new reactor funding will come from Washington in the near future. There is still an $18.5 billion loan guarantee fund left over from the Bush Era. But the Department of Energy has run into serious political and procedural problems in administering the money. It may soon announce one or more new reactor projects designated to get the money, possibly including one in Georgia, where ratepayers have been put on the line to underwrite construction even if the plant never opens.

Republican proposals for virtually unlimited future loan guarantees are now being targeted for a Climate Bill and other legislation that may or may not make it through Congress in the coming months. Sen. John McCain(R-AZ) and other industry supporters are pushing hard for major federal financing. The Obama Administration has made some pro-nuclear rumblings, but remains elusive in terms of firm commitments.

Because the reactor industry cannot get private financing for new reactors, all the pro-nuke rhetoric in the world will mean nothing without federal subsidies. After 50 years, the industry doesn’t have Wall Street’s backing. Nor can it get private liability insurance in case of a major disaster. And it still lacks a solution for its radioactive waste problem.

Most critically of all, the longer new construction is delayed the less competitive the industry becomes. Cost estimates are literally all over the map, with $7-9 billion for a 1000 megawatt reactor being current used as a benchmark.

But even that is not expected to last. The Oswego project involves a design financed by the French government. This latest setback indicates even they may not be as bullish on reactors as they hype would indicate. As Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service puts it, “Unistar’s postponement is just another indicator that new reactors will not be built unless American taxpayers are forced to take the financial risk.”

Thus as the dust settles from the failures in Copenhagen, the US might look to the conference’s host country. In the 1970s a powerful Green movement stopped the Danes from going nuclear.

Instead, as even the New York Times’s pro-nuclear Thomas Friedman has recently acknowledged, Denmark successfully focussed on wind power. Today the wind industry is one of Denmakr’s top employers, and is a major source of both clean green energy and significant financial profit.

Throughout the world, the cost of renewables is plummeting while reactor prices soar. So if America’s thus-far successful grassroots campaign against massive federal loan guarantees and other nuclear bailouts can continue, we just might find ourselves on a parallel path to a green-powered Earth.

Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com, as is HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace US, and senior editor of www.freepress.org.

Boxer-Kerry Climate Bill Greenwashes Nuclear Power

Posted on by

Bowing to pressure from the pro-nuclear lobby, Senators Boxer and Kerry have included nuclear power into their bill to address climate change. In their proposed legislation, the Senators claim that “nuclear energy is the largest provider of clean, low-carbon, electricity….” Funny we’ve heard that before. In fact, the bill’s nuclear section reads like it was lifted off the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) website, despite its lack of veracity.

Over a decade ago, environmentalists challenged the nuclear industry’s propaganda that they were clean and green. As a result, the Better Business Bureau’s ( BBB ) National Advertising Division found that the Nuclear Energy Institute’s ads falsely claimed that nuclear reactors make power without polluting the air and water or damaging the environment. The BBB said that, “The nuclear industry should stop calling itself ‘environmentally clean’ and should stop saying it makes power ‘without polluting the environment.’” The director of the division said such claims were “unsupportable.” The bureau agreed with environmentalists that nuclear fuel is made using electricity from coal plants and that nuclear waste poses a threat to the public health and safety.

The nuclear industry’s brazen disregard for the BBB prompted the environmental groups to bring NEI before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC found that

 

[B]ecause the discharge of hot water from cooling systems is known to harm the environment, and given the unresolved issues surrounding disposal of radioactive waste, we think that NEI has failed to substantiate its general environmental benefit claim.

 

Unfortunately those same false claims have now found their way into the legislation offered by Senator’s Boxer and Kerry.

Even Andrew Kadak, “Professor of the Practice” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has acknowledged that nuclear power contributes CO2 to the environment. In a speech before the American Physical Society entitled “A Renaissance for Nuclear Energy?” Kadak bemoaned the fact that the international community had already rejected nuclear power as a solution to climate change. However, Kadak recognized that:

 

For many years, nuclear energy, while arguably a -CO2 emitting energy source, has been judged to be unacceptable for reasons of safety, unstable regulatory climate, a lack of a waste disposal solution and, more recently, economics.

 

If the Senators actually want to abate climate change rather than merely enriching nuclear corporations, we need solutions that are fast, safe and affordable, and that rules out nuclear power. The Congressional Budget Office has already determined that the risk of default on the nuclear loan guarantees congress will supply to the nuclear industry is well above 50%. Is it really the Senator’s intent to support the next taxpayer bailout?

Mid American, a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, has already conducted their economic due diligence on a new nuclear plant and determined that it does not make economic sense to build. If the “world’s greatest investor” will not waste his resources on new nuclear power, perhaps the Senate should listen.

But Warren Buffet’s corporation isn’t the only one who thinks nuclear power is an economic non-starter. In April, Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stated that new nuclear and coal plants are not needed. Renewable energy like wind & solar and improvements in energy efficiency will provide enough energy to meet our future energy demands. Wellinghoff concluded that nuclear and coal plants are too expensive.

In June, Moody’s Investor Services released their analysis of new nuclear generation and determined that nuclear power was a “bet the farm” risk. Why should the American taxpayer be expected to support such an investment?

The history of nuclear power plant cost overruns that led Forbes magazine to call nuclear power the “largest managerial disaster in business history” is repeating itself with the current generation of nuclear reactors. Last month, the French nuclear giant, Areva announced that they had lost 550 million euros, a 79% drop in their profits, due to construction delays with their reactor in Finland. According to Areva, the 3-billion euro nuclear plant has now accumulated 2.3 billion euros in estimated losses. Does the Senate really want to repeat this fiscal fiasco in the U.S.?

Nuclear power is a deadly and dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change and our energy needs. Nuclear power is unsafe, uneconomical & unnecessary. Rather than greenwashing nuclear power, Senators Boxer and Kerry should cut the nuclear title from their bill and work to oppose any attempts to support this failed experiment.

Jim Riccio, Nuclear Policy Analyst

Nuclear Insecurity after 9-11

Posted on by

Seven years have past since the attacks on the World trade Center and the Pentagon and now a little more than four months remain in the Bush Presidency. The American homeland hasn’t been attacked again since that horrific day, but if terrorists were to target a nuclear power plant would the nuclear industry be ready?

The Bush administration’s nuclear regulators have forced the industry’s 104 nuclear reactors to add more guards and guns on the ground at nuclear plant sites. However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has failed to adequately address the threat to both new and existing nuclear power plants and the radioactive wastes they produce.

After September 11th, the NRC revisited the level of protection afforded nuclear plants. The nuclear industry opposed changes that would have placed nuclear security guards under federal authority and lobbied the NRC to set the security standard, known as the design basis threat, as low as possible.

Even after the 9-11 attacks, the nuclear industry argued that it shouldn’t be required to defend against terrorists since they were “enemies of the state.” And unfortunately the Bush Administration’s NRC agreed with the industry. As a result, the NRC didn’t set the new security standard based upon the actual threat to nuclear plants. Instead, then NRC Chairman Diaz, who had claimed that nuclear plants were best defended from an airliner attack at the airport, based the new security standard on what a private security force could be expected to defend against.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s NRC did not base the new security standard upon on the force, size and capabilities of the terrorists that have threatened U.S. reactors.  It based the new security standard upon the capabilities of nuclear industry’s guard force! If this nonsensical approach to defending nuclear power plants wasn’t bad enough, recent revelations of nuclear plant guards sleeping on the job and the lack of NRC oversight only serve to heighten concerns about security.

Last September, CBS News broke a story about sleeping guards at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.  A worker at the plant had informed the NRC Region I office that security guards were sleeping on the job. However, the NRC failed to act on the information when the nuclear plant owner, Exelon, said it found no evidence. So CBS News aired videotape of the guards sleeping.  You can view the CBS story here:

http://wcbstv.com/politics/peach.bottom.nuclear.2.291442.html

The NRC has since scrambled and has tried to repair the damage to its reputation by fining the nuclear corporation; but it has also threatened the whistleblower who filmed the sleeping guards with a violation of the Patriot Act for taking pictures inside a nuclear plant!

Congressman John Dingle (D- MI) who oversees the NRC said that, “(t)he NRC’s stunning failure to act on credible allegations of sleeping security guards, coupled with its unwillingness to protect the whistleblower who uncovered the problem, raises troubling questions.” It should, when it comes to nuclear whistleblowers the NRC has had a long history of shooting the messenger.

Congressman Dingle isn’t the only one to take issue with the NRC’s handling of the sleeping security guards.  The NRC’s Inspector General also found fault with the agency’s handling of the allegations.  The IG found that NRC Region I failed to follow proper procedures dealing with allegations by whistleblowers and merely called Exelon to see if security guards were sleeping at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant.  The NRC IG report can be found here:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/insp-gen/2008/ei-07-65.pdf

Security guards have also been caught sleeping at Entergy’s Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, 24 miles north of New York City and at the FPL’s Turkey Point nuclear plant 25 miles South of Miami, FL.

So, how many terrorists can sleeping guards defend against?

Unfortunately, this amazing lack of regulatory rigor is emblematic of the Bush administration’s NRC since 9-11.  In order to force nuclear regulators to better defend nuclear reactors and their wastes, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-MA) introduced legislation last month to correct the most glaring inadequacies.

In the House of Representatives, the legislation has been introduced as H.R. 6816, “The Nuclear Facility and Materials Security Act of 2008.”

The proposed legislation would address many of the gaps in the nuclear security left by the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to regulate the nuclear industry.  If enacted H.R. 6818 would:

  • Require that any new reactor built in the U.S.- be designed to withstand the impact of a large commercial aircraft;

 

  • Require that spent fuel from nuclear reactors be stored in the safest manner possible while in the spent fuel pool, for the fuel to be moved to dry storage as soon as possible, and upgrading the security requirements for spent fuel storage facilities;

 

  • Require the distribution of anti-radiation pills (potassium iodide or KI pills) to communities within 20 miles of our nation’s nuclear power plants;

 

  • Require that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission abide by a recent court decision that directed that before new or revised licenses for nuclear reactors are granted, that the potential consequences of an act of terrorism be considered; and

 

  • that the highest-risk radiation sources that could be used to make a dirty bomb be equipped with location tracking technology and requiring less dangerous technologies to be used where possible.

What is truly disheartening is that this legislation is even necessary seven years after 9-11.  You’d have thought that a responsible regulator would have already addressed these threats, especially after being warned that terrorists wanted to turn reactors into pre positioned weapons of mass destruction.  Unfortunately, since 9-11, we’ve had a President and an administration that would rather lie about threats to and posed by nuclear power plants than actually defend the public health and safety.

Hopefully the next president and new leadership at the NRC will be more responsible.

– Jim