Skip to main content

DOE to Announce Details About the Blue-Ribbon Commission on Used Nuclear Fuel "Soon"

By
Via Nasdaq:
As part of a long-running rift over how to deal with the nation's nuclear power waste, the Obama administration announced plans this year to cancel the Yucca Mountain waste repository site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Although Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in April he would appoint a panel to determine the country's future nuclear waste policy, there's been no news since of who would be named and when the panel would be convened.

DOE spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller told Dow Jones on Wednesday, "We are planning to make an announcement soon," but declined to elaborate.

The Department of Energy won't say what caused the delay, but some industry officials have said one of the difficulties could be the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which guides how such panels are appointed. The law - designed to ensure an objective and balanced representation of policy options - prevents the administration from stocking the panel with members who would likely reach the same conclusion.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ah, the well-defined, oh-so-certain "soon". Is that "soon" as in geologic time? Or maybe until after the 2012 elections? Just the latest round of kicking the can down the road. Yep, real leadership, that. Hope and change, you know...
September 17, 2009 at 1:58 PM
Anonymous said…
"real leadership, that. Hope and change, you know"

What, compared to the breakneck speed with which nuclear waste issues were addressed in the Bush administration? Come on.
September 17, 2009 at 3:46 PM
Anonymous said…
Here's a news flash: George Bush isn't President anymore. This is all on Obama now. It is his DOE that is railroading YM down the tubes (in violation of the law of the land, the NWPA), and claiming they will appoint a "Blue Ribbon Commission" to "study" the nuclear waste issue. Change we can believe in, that's for sure.

Come on yourself.
September 17, 2009 at 4:45 PM
BCRion said…
Regardless of your feelings about the Obama administration, this debate is irrelevant for the matter at hand. If you support nuclear energy, the only way for it to be politically sustainable is to get broad support from people on both sides of the political isles.

What this means is write your representatives, talk to people in your community, get involved with ANS outreach activities. Change occurs one mind at a time. :)
September 17, 2009 at 7:33 PM
Author said…
Shouldn't the expert committee have convened before the $20-billion-wasting decision to terminate the Yucca repository was made? Or is the purpose of this committee to provide after-the-fact justifications?

The cart pulls the horse.

By the way, there's an interview on this with Steven Chu at the Tech Review. He seems to lean towards fast-neutron transmutation:

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/22651/?a=f

Which would nicely obviate this issue.
September 17, 2009 at 10:57 PM
Kit P said…
I worked on YMP back when Clinton was president. The decision to move forward on YMP was on Clinton's desk. One of the first things Bush did was make the decision to move forward with That was the correct technical decision but was immediately criticized.

One of the first decisions the Obama made was to kill YMP. Why? All I have heard was that we could do better. I could do better if I went back high school and took geometry but did good enough the first time.

Since no valid technical reasons have been provided, I think it is fair to suggest that reason are political.
September 18, 2009 at 8:01 AM
Anonymous said…
Typical Obama policy - make irrational uninformed decision first, figure out the impacts and alternatives later. Closing Gitmo, anyone? With Yucca Mountain, it's good to see that the administration is folowing through with "putting science in it's proper place." (Apparently, that means a place where noone can hear it screaming the obvious answers.) Maybe he will appoint a Nuclear Waste Czar and give him unconstitutional super powers...
September 18, 2009 at 8:46 AM
Anonymous said…
Pretty hilarious to see a Bush supporter excoriate Obama for acting outside the constitution. Dick Cheney established an entire fourth branch of government to start wars based on fabricated intelligence and torture people.

Bush isn't president now? Yes, but he was for eight years. Obama's been in office eight months, and you're hypocritically saying he's dragging his feet on waste.

I expect this comment won't be posted, though even the off-topic anti-Obama rants will somehow continue to make it onto the board.
September 18, 2009 at 12:28 PM
Anonymous said…
Obama is not only dragging his feet, he is acting like a dictator by unilaterally overturning the provisions of the NWPA for blatantly political reasons. Bush may have not done much on the waste issue in your NSHO, but he made the decisions and moved the YM project forward. He didn't pull the plug on it like The Won has done and kicked the can down the road with some bogus "Blue Ribbon Commission" (which hasn't even been set up yet, much less met, much much less done anything). Don't you understand that true leadership involves more than just voting "present" and punting the ball?
September 18, 2009 at 1:00 PM
D Koloff said…
Obama is most certainly not dragging his feet on nuclear waste. He is working very hard to prevent a solution to the imaginary problem of what to do with nuclear waste. When I was an anti-nuke, there was considerable focus on stopping the back end of nuclear power; waste disposal. Even when I was rising out of the anti-nuclear miasma, I remained concerned about spent fuel. Then I learned about two things: Oklo and coal waste. All real science supports the construction of the Yucca Mtn future fuel storage facility. Only cynical left-wing politics could lead a President to do what Obama has done.
September 18, 2009 at 10:10 PM
Pete said…
The DOE has become the master of ambiguities. We will "soon" hear more about the blue ribbon commission. Yesterday, another DOE official said the Obama administration is “still thinking” about nuclear energy.

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2009/09/not-intentionally-funny.html

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, but even I have to admit that leadership on nuclear issues from this administration is lacking. And the flawed advice they are getting from Harry Reid is, as Kit P suggests, shrouded in politics.
September 23, 2009 at 8:25 PM
Anonymous said…
It is all symptomatic of weak and ineffective leadership: appointing "commissions" (which haven't been formed), initiating "studies" (for something already "studied" to death), defining timelines in terms of "soon" (relative to geologic time), "thinking about" things (a case of thinking too much and acting too little), voting present when it comes to important energy policy. This is really the "In" Administration, incompetent, ineffective, indecisive.
September 24, 2009 at 9:16 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
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...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
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...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
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...
6 comments
Read more