Some 20 reactors at 15 nuclear power plants (NPPs) across the U.S. have plans to shut down or are in the midst of being decommissioned, a process that traditionally takes decades.
[SEE: USA TODAY NETWORK's Northeast project, The Nuclear Option.]
Designed to last, at most, 40 years, America's crumbling NPPs have been foolishly extended time and time again, mainly because of the enormous cost of shutting them down and dealing with the "safe" storage of all that nuclear waste from spent fuel rods and contaminated buildings, storage containers and land.
WHEN NPPs WERE FIRST CONSTRUCTED THERE WERE NO "BUILDING CODES" TO GO BY, NO ONE KNEW THE POWER OF RADIATION TO EMBRITTLE CONCRETE, WEAKEN STRUCTURES, RUIN MACHINERY, ETC.
NOW WE KNOW...TOO LATE.
Maine's Yankee nuclear power plant hasn't produced a single watt of energy in more than two decades, but it cost U.S. taxpayers about $35 million this year.
IF ONE LOOKS AT THE CLOSINGS OF NPPs, ONE CAN SEE THAT NONE HELD UP TO THAT 40-YEARS PREDICTION.
THE MAIN REASON FOR MANY CLOSING EARLY WAS THE STEAM GENERATOR WAS CRACKING.
SEE THE PDF CHARTS <HERE>.
The Department of Energy’s cleanup responsibilities are a tall order and include, “(1) storing and treating about 90 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste located in nearly 240 large underground tanks at three sites across the country; (2) remediating millions of cubic meters of soil and more than 1 billion gallons of groundwater; (3) preparing and disposing of 2,400 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and about 21 metric tons of surplus highly enriched uranium materials; and (4) deactivating and decommissioning about 1,700 excess facilities, some of which are highly contaminated.”
DID YOU KNOW RADIOACTIVE WASTE IS STILL SITTING AT THREE MILE ISLAND?
APRIL 17, 2020
In an April 6 letter to NRC chair Kristine Svinicki, DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell detailed a number of issues, including a lack of funds to properly clean up the site, unknown levels of radiation that remain on site, how and where the remaining radioactive materials will be disposed of, and how the process could affect the health of the Susquehanna River.
31 YEARS AFTER MELTDOWN.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 encouraged private corporations to build nuclear reactors and a significant learning phase followed with many early partial core meltdowns and accidents at experimental reactors and research facilities.
This led to the introduction of the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, which was "...an implicit admission that nuclear power provided risks that producers were unwilling to assume without federal backing."
It documents 279 incidents that have been responsible for $41 billion in property damage and 182,156 deaths.
[See Benjamin K. Sovacool, "The costs of failure: A preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907–2007", Energy Policy 36 (2008), p. 1808.]
The estimated cost of cleaning up America's nuclear waste jumped more than $100 billion in just one year, according to a DOE report, and that cost will only climb.
The Cost to Clean Up America’s Cold War Nuclear Waste Jumps to $377 Billion.
That's the bill for a half century of nuclear weapons production and it's growing fast.
[See https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26145608/nuclear-waste-cleanup-cost-377-billion/ By Kyle Mizokami.Feb 5, 2019.]
Feb. 7, 2019
The United States developed and built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
A new report by the General Accounting Office (GAO)## estimates the total cleanup cost for the radioactive contamination incurred by developing and producing these weapons at a staggering $377 billion, a number that jumped by more than $100 billion in just one year.
By far the most expensive site to clean up is the Hanford site in Washington state, which manufactured nuclear material for use in nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
In 2017, the DoE estimated site cleanup costs for just Hanford at $141 billion.
"If a decommissioning fund goes bankrupt and the job isn't completed, they walk away and leave the cleanup to the states,” said Tim Judson, the executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
In February, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey voiced her concerns in a petition to intervene in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) review of the pending sale of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth to Holtec International of Camden, New Jersey, a company that buys NPPs with the promise to more quickly and cheaply shut them down.
(Nuclear plant operators have up to 60 years to dismantle plants and move the spent fuel into casks. Holtec, which manufactures casks**, says its engineers have developed a plan that will enable it to move highly radioactive spent fuel into casks within three and a half years instead of the usual five and completely dismantle the reactor within eight years.)
Holtec has plans for an underground repository in southeastern New Mexico to hold some of the 80,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel that’s been building up at the nation’s nuclear power plants over the past six decades.
Federal officials say it’s enough to fill a football field 20 meters (over 60 feet) deep.
In 1967 at the height of the U.S.–Soviet nuclear arms race, the U.S. nuclear stockpile totaled 31,255 weapons of all types.
Today, that number stands at just 6,550.
Although the U.S. SAYS it has deactivated and destroyed 25,000 nuclear weapons, their legacy is still very much alive.
The federal government will have to sign off on the transportation routes chosen to get spent fuel to New Mexico from power plants across country, whether by rail, truck or barge.
THAT'S ANOTHER NRC SECRET...NEVER TELL RESIDENTS WHERE THE NUCLEAR WASTE IS UNLESS THERE'S A PROBLEM, MAYBE NOT EVEN THEN.
And Holtec will have to raise the money for the project. The company has already spent about $8 million on its efforts to secure an NRC license but will need much more to build.
If the funding comes through, construction would begin in 2021 and the first shipment of spent fuel would arrive in 2023.
Watchdog groups, politicians, scientists and experts on decommissioning nuclear plants are questioning whether safety will be sacrificed for speed, as profit-seeking companies rush to finish one job so they can move on to the next.
There are also worries that the trust funds will be bled dry before the job is completed, leaving taxpayers — and anyone who pays for electricity — footing the bill.
It does NOT include the locations of research reactor sites, special nuclear materials (e.g., plutonium-239 and uranium-235), transuranic wastes, or low-level nuclear wastes, which is why locations like Northern New Mexico appear so pristine on the map, despite continuing nuclear waste presence there.
Owners of nuclear power plants have sued the federal government for leaving nuclear waste "stranded" at their facilities.
At the end of 2016, the Department of Energy said the federal government had already paid out $6.1 billion to the owners of spent nuclear fuel and owes another $25 billion. The amount of waste is growing by 2,200 metric tons a year and is expected to hit 140,000 metric tons over the next 50 years, the Government Accountability Office says.
"No country, including the United States, has a permanent geologic repository for disposal of commercial SNF (spent nuclear fuel) and other HLW (high-level waste). Currently, commercial nuclear power plants generally store SNF on site, awaiting disposal in a permanent repository," Larsen writes.
There's NO place to safely bury and then guard it for the one million years necessary while ALL the radioactive decays take place.
That's right...1,000,000 years.
Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter time frames: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. These are still such unimaginably vast lengths of time that regulatory authorities decide on them, in part, based on how long ice ages are expected to last.
Even stopping nuclear power operations is a necessarily drawn-out process.
Decommissioning a single nuclear reactor typically takes about 20 years. Most countries grappling with nuclear waste are planning for at least 40 to 60 years just to implement their repository programs.
The initial cost of decommissioning Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant was estimated to be USD $19 billion (2 trillion yen). But now it appears that actual expenses are escalating much beyond what was previously projected.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California cost billions of dollars to build five decades ago. It's estimated to cost a few billion more than that to close it.
Plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) had asked for $4.8 billion dollars to decommission Diablo, but the settlement in January this year agreed to $3.9 billion dollars.
The settlement also speeds up the removal of spent nuclear fuel from cooling pools to safer dry casks. Instead of taking up to ten years to do so, PG&E has agreed to a four-year timeline.
WHO DEFINES "SAFE" STORAGE AREAS?
THERE AREN'T ANY.
THERE ARE NONE.
AND NO ONE WANTS ALL THAT RADIATION BURIED NEAR THEIR FAMILIES, THEIR HOMES.
DO YOU KNOW OF ONE POLITICIAN OR CEO WHO LIVES WITHIN RANGE OF A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, A WASTE SITE, A URANIUM MINE?
THEY KNOW THAT THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SAFETY WHEN IT COMES TO "BIG NUKE".
ALL ONE HAS TO DO IS LOOK AT WIPP IN NEW MEXICO TO SEE THE SAFETY FAILURES.
NRC HANDED WIPP EVERY EXCUSE IN THE BOOK AND LET IT REOPEN, JUST AS NRC ALLOWS HANFORD TO DAILY CONTAMINATE THE PLANET.
NRC REGULATES HONEST INFORMATION, NOT THE FAILURES AND HAZARDS OF THE NUCLEAR ENERGY BOYS.
The NRC's lack of transparency and its catering to NPPs' owners is the stuff of legends. It is the ultimate bureaucracy, akin to the old Soviet Union. It's virtually impossible for the average citizen to get answers to seemingly simple questions from NRC..
A DUMP LIKE NO OTHER IS STILL A DUMP.
The REALLY BIG dump, officially known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), was designed to place waste from nuclear weapons production since World War II into ancient salt beds, which engineers say will collapse around the waste and permanently seal it.
NO ONE KNOWS WHAT WILL HAPPEN AFTER SAID COLLAPSE, IN, SAY 100 YEARS, 1,000, 10,000.
We can expect containers will be crushed, radiation will leak, just as it did in WIPP's latest "accident", THANKS TO CONGRESS, THE DEPT. OF ENERGY AND THE NRC
Once the ludicrous scheme of shooting nuclear waste into space was trashed. the consensus among nuclear scientists was that the best option for dealing with high-level nuclear waste is deep geological disposal.
One of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s conditions for such a geological site is low groundwater content, which has been stable for at least tens of thousands of years, and geological stability, over millions of years.
Thus, Japan, with its seismic instability, is unlikely to have any suitable candidates for deep geological disposal.
WHERE, IN EARTH'S PAST, WAS THERE EVER KNOWN, PROVABLE, 100% CERTAIN 'GEOLOGICAL STABILITY' FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS?
HOW 'GEOLOGICALLY STABLE' WOULD ANY AREA BE IF HIT BY NUCLEAR BOMBS, A LARGE METEOR, CATASTROPHIC FLOODING, POLE SHIFT?
IT'S BEEN 70+ YEARS SINCE WE OPENED PANDORA'S BOX OF NUCLEAR WASTE.
70+ years since the beginning of 'the nuclear age', and NO scientist, NO country in the world has found a real solution to the radioactive legacy of good old nuclear power...toxic nuclear waste.
Or, as Openheimer put it, nuclear 'power' became Death, Destroyer of worlds.
Nearly every government claims to apply "the polluter-pays-principle", which makes operators of nuclear power plants and uranium mines liable for the costs of creating, managing, storing, and disposing of nuclear waste.
In reality, however, governments fail to apply the polluter-pays-principle consistently and citizens get stuck with the enormous costs as governments BAIL-OUT each decaying power plant and keep failing to find a way to actually deal with a million years of safely burying deadly nuclear waste.
Once they had 'THE BOMB', they turned their full attention to making bigger/better bombs, to "testing" bombs, creating what we all know today as "background radiation", or "normal radiation".
NO, THE LEVEL OF RADIATION WE LIVE WITH TODAY DAMNED SURE WAS NOT "NORMAL" NOR WAS IT IN THE 'BACKGROUND' BEFORE HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, NEVADA TEST GROUNDS, PACIFIC ATOLLS TEST SITES, ETC.
AND UNTIL THE 1940s, THERE WAS NO "DOWNWIND" RADIATION FROM A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, BECAUSE THERE WERE NO NPPs.
WE WEREN'T MAKING AND USING UP NUCLEAR FUEL RODS BEFORE THE 1940s, OR USING "NUCLEAR MEDICINE".
WE WERE LIED TO, USED AS HUMAN GUINEA PIGS AND ARE NOW LEFT TO SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES OF OPENHEIMER, ET AL, BECOMING DEATH...OUR DEATH.
REGRET, APOLOGIES, HINDSIGHT WON'T REVERSE THE OPENING OF THAT HATEFUL PANDORA'S BOX.
Above, military personnel being exposed to fallout.
________________________________
END NOTES:
** Several Holtec casks have sprung leaks at the San Onofre nuclear plant in California, where the company has been cited by the NRC for safety problems. While Holtec has made claims about the lifespans of its cask designs, there is ample reason for skepticism. And one of the major worries is there is no way to monitor what's going on inside the cask. Casks only need to be replaced if corrosion is visible on the outside.
## Read the GAO report here (PDF).
//WW
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