Recycling Gets a Hearing

Annette Carey does a good job in the TriCity Herald of covering a public meeting that occurred there covering the possibility of recycling used nuclear fuel. Sponsored by the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) in Pasco, Washington - the tri-cities also include Kennewick and Richland - the meeting directly addressed the elephant in the room: the Hanford site. Hanford might seem a big bullseye for controversy, yet the attendees seemed quite sanguine about its potential as a recycling center.

Hanford still would be an ideal site for reprocessing used commercial reactor fuel for reuse, said several speakers at Monday's hearing.

The Tri-City Development Council has consistently said cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation is its top priority, said Gary Petersen, TRIDEC vice president of Hanford programs. But reprocessing fuel could not only be good for economic development, but also help clean up Hanford by recycling the spent fuel sitting at Energy Northwest, he said.

So there you have the economic argument and an acceptance of Hanford as an functional element in the community.

The nation would do better to focus on cleanup and conservation, [Tom] Carpenter [of Hanford Challenge, which watchdogs the site] said. Much work on solar and wind power could be done in Eastern Washington with a far quicker payoff than developing proposed plans for nuclear fuel reprocessing, he said.

And there you have the environmental argument. We suppose you could do both - solar and wind are obviously different kinds of projects than recycling and both look to benefit from an Obama administration. We're not really all that sure these - especially solar - are logical power generators for that part of the country, but they know better than us. (And we admit to the suspicion that solar and wind are convenient go-tos when one wants to promote "benign" energy.)

We should note that GNEP wasn't proposing putting a recycling center at Hanford at this gathering, though that might be percolating somewhere in their planning - the goal here was to discuss recycling as an issue in itself.

"People don't seem to understand the difference between civil nuclear power and the Department of Defense," said Chris Orton, a third-generation Hanford worker, who said he represented the up and coming engineers and scientists.

We second that. "Up and coming" - young, we guess he means, perhaps edgy and hip? An edgy engineer should never be let out at night - a hip one never.

We could go on, but read the whole thing. It's an interesting conversation, covering a spectrum of opinions, and Cary covers it well. It's great to see GNEP engage with communities in this way.

Bonus: Here's a video produced by Hanford Challenge. Tom Carpenter introduces it.

A view from Hanford.

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Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

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Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

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You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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