It should provide great reassurance that the current Energy Secretary Rick Perry when running as a pResidential candidate proposed closing several federal agencies and couldn't remember the name of one - the Energy Dept.
His 2 predecessors at the Energy Dept. were Nuclear Physicists, one a Nobel Prize winner.
The Dancing Clown is in charge of Nuclear Power Plants and Nuclear Weapons.
Sheila Parks:
Some solution - moving the most toxic waste on the planet in containers across the country.
“Pilgrim’s waste clearly cannot stay where it is,” said Karen Vale, a member of Cape Cod Bay Watch. “Right now it is extremely close to the shoreline and rising seas, but the plan to get it where it needs to go also has to be seriously considered.”
"Vale said a plan developed in 2002 called for transporting the waste from Plymouth to Boston on barges, and from Boston to Nevada on trains.
“Accidents can happen — but the Department of Energy never analyzed the consequences of a spill in our waterways,” Vale said. “This plan for transport puts the entire ecosystem of Cape Cod Bay and the economy of Massachusetts at risk.”
“Accidents can happen — but the Department of Energy never analyzed the consequences of a spill in our waterways,” Vale said. “This plan for transport puts the entire ecosystem of Cape Cod Bay and the economy of Massachusetts at risk.”
Senator supports moving spent nuclear fuel from Pilgrim
Friday
By Christine Legere
State Sen. Viriato “Vinny” deMacedo had believed the door was forever closed on Yucca Mountain as the solution to long-term storage of the nation’s highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel, when the Obama administration stopped the flow of federal dollars to the project in 2010.
Now, 30 years after the initial targeting of the Nevada site situated 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the door once again opened a crack with President Donald Trump’s inclusion of $120 million for project licensing in his federal budget blueprint.
DeMacedo sees it as an opportunity for the region to get several tons of fuel, now stored at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, out of Plymouth, and he has penned a letter to President Trump supporting the initiative, which he hopes other legislators in the region will sign.
“This is a good step in the whole drama, and I think my colleagues should be encouraged,” said deMacedo, R-Plymouth. While conceding tension exists among legislators due to the current political climate, the state representative added, “This is something we can all support.”
Plymouth, like host communities across the country, has been grappling with the problem and dangers of onsite fuel storage at Pilgrim, where there are currently more than 4,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies housed in the reactor, a massive spent fuel pool, and outside in steel-lined concrete casks.
“The town of Plymouth is America’s Hometown,” deMacedo writes to the President. “Because of the federal government’s failure to comply with the (Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982,) Plymouth is a de facto nuclear waste storage site.”
The Pilgrim plant is set to close on May 31, 2019. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the federal government was committed to removing waste fuel from the nation’s reactor sites by 1998.
Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission | Interactive map: Gregory Bryant / Cape Cod Times
DeMacedo and other area legislators want to see the Pilgrim site cleared of buildings and radioactive material, including the spent fuel, as quickly and safely as possible.
State Rep. Sarah Peake, D-Provincetown, said Thursday she’ll gladly sign the letter. “We have to put public safety above politics,” Peake said. “I think it’s important to move the spent fuel rods to a facility specifically constructed to handle nuclear waste, and to get them off Cape Cod Bay.”
Other legislators, like Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro, still had the letter under review.
When the funding dried up several years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was in the process of considering a license application for Yucca Mountain.
“Much of the review was done but a hearing had not yet been held,” NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said. “It is a multiyear review process. At this point, no one knows exactly where it will end up.”
On behalf of Entergy, Pilgrim’s owner-operator, Patrick O’Brien wrote in an email that the company is “encouraged by the administration’s proposal to revisit federal spent fuel management and will continue to follow it closely.”
“Be it Yucca mountain or another interim solution, the federal government must live up to its legal obligation, set forth in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, to manage the nation’s used fuel,” O’Brien said.
David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said there is no way to predict whether the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository will ever be completed. “The House seems on board, but the Senate seems more interested in interim storage, especially for plants that have been shut down,” Lochbaum said.
The NRC has an application under review for an above-ground interim storage facility in West Texas to fill the gap. The agency also expects an application shortly for an underground interim storage facility in New Mexico.
Lochbaum pointed out pushback from residents and Nevada legislators that successfully halted the pursuit of Yucca Mountain in 2010 will likely start up again.
“I was at a conference recently with some folks from Nevada,” Lochbaum said. “They say Yucca is dead; it’s a zombie. If it rises again, they’ll whack it down.”
Pilgrim watchdog Mary Lampert, director of the citizens group Pilgrim Watch, agrees with deMacedo that “Pilgrim’s mountain of highly toxic, long-lived spent nuclear fuel would be far safer stored in a permanent storage facility located deep underground so that it will be isolated for the tens of thousands of years it will be toxic — than on the shores of Cape Cod Bay.”
In any case, the full build-out of Yucca, if it secures a license, is several years down the road.
If it is successfully constructed, there will then be the problem of transporting 79,000 metric tons of nuclear waste already generated nationwide to Nevada.
“Pilgrim’s waste clearly cannot stay where it is,” said Karen Vale, a member of Cape Cod Bay Watch. “Right now it is extremely close to the shoreline and rising seas, but the plan to get it where it needs to go also has to be seriously considered.”
Vale said a plan developed in 2002 called for transporting the waste from Plymouth to Boston on barges, and from Boston to Nevada on trains.
“Accidents can happen — but the Department of Energy never analyzed the consequences of a spill in our waterways,” Vale said. “This plan for transport puts the entire ecosystem of Cape Cod Bay and the economy of Massachusetts at risk.”
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade organization that represents the nuclear industry, fully supports completing the scientific and engineering study of Yucca.
“Energy Secretary Rick Perry toured the Yucca Mountain Repository earlier this week,” NEI spokesman Matthew Wald said. “We take that as evidence that the administration is serious.”
As much as I'd like to see Pilgrim's spent nuclear fuel stored safely and far away from here, Yucca Mountain Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository is nothing more than a fancy name for a waste storage/disposal solution called 'land filling' and I hope we all know how unsuccessful that is. It's an antique technology and sensibility that is no longer practiced for domestic waste, never mind hazardous waste. The problems experienced with underground storage at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State (container degradation) and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico (accidental releases) should be fair warning. And then there's the problem of safe transport. The genie is out of the bottle.
In the early 80's, everyone knew then a place was needed to store the spent fuel rods - but yukka was prone to earth quakes. Almost 40 years later and earthquake science hasn't changed but the number of fuel rods needing storage has. Rocket science. What's in your back yard? Plymouth Nuclear is in mine and there's really no evacuation plan in place for an emergency either. Why would any senator want to send his state's hazard to another state? Money? Shut it down.
@Mary Greetham This isn't new. Cape Cod Times is leaving decades of their reporting out of the mix here. It's been festering for decades on the fuel rod storage issue for sure, easily 30 years, bur as far as hazardous leakage , maybe less than a decade if we go easy.
Ask anyone that worked there. They will tell you it was a minimal leak because they need their job. Just google this place. It's a nightmare without the feds getting involved,.
Ask anyone that worked there. They will tell you it was a minimal leak because they need their job. Just google this place. It's a nightmare without the feds getting involved,.
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