[ RadSafe ] [Nuclear News] Ghana: Going Nuclear: Can We Even Manage Domestic Waste?

[Sandy Perle]

Index:

Going Nuclear: Can We Even Manage Domestic Waste?
Scans clear UK beaches of radiation  
U. of Pittsburgh won't be fined for violations of federal regulations
Sandia tests radiation detectors
IAEA to visit Japan quake-hit nuclear plant next week 
Nuclear waste leak in Washington contained
TVA to expand nuclear operation at Tennessee plant
FitzPatrick NPP - Public is silent at final nuclear plant meeting 
Former Savannah River Site nuclear engineer sent to prison
------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghana: Going Nuclear: Can We Even Manage Domestic Waste?

(All Africa.com) Aug 2 - THE COMMITTEE of experts set up by the 
government to look into Ghana's prevailing energy crisis has 
identified nuclear energy as the only long-term panacea. Among other 
things, the committee has called for immediate steps to be taken in 
pursuit of nuclear energy as an alternative source of power.

The recent energy crisis has caused us to look beyond the narrow 
confines of our hydroelectric and thermal power for generation of 
electricity. Now today, our experts are calling for nuclear energy as 
the last bastion against any energy crisis.
 
These recommendations are enough to bring a relief to a nation 
sweltering under the heat of energy crisis, which has crippled the 
economy, but before we are consumed to believe that Ghana going 
nuclear energy would solve our problem let us look dark side which 
nuclear energy brings. The committee report seems to be silent on 
this. We can get electricity 24/7 as results of going nuclear but 
other set of problem will emerge. The solution of one problem brings 
into face the emergence of another one.

In this present world, the emphasis has been producing a clean energy 
and not just any energy. The recent G8 Summit in Germany sought to 
reduce carbon emission and the potential of a nuclear fall out from 
new emerging nuclear nations like India, Pakistan and Iran.

Some few years ago, there were two imperatives driving energy policy -
 affordability and security of supply. There is now a third right up 
there in lights alongside them. It is the need to stop poisoning our 
atmosphere with carbon emissions and other harmful gases and thereby 
contributing to the rise of global warming.

Perhaps the nuclear age is winding down in the global scale. The gap 
between the cost of nuclear and other technologies like solar and 
wind is narrowing. Indeed, some energy experts say in certain places, 
high-tech windmills are already cheaper than atomic power.

Concerns about global climate change have led many nations to join 
together in an effort to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. As 
part of an international treaty signed in Rio de Janiero in 1992, the 
industrialised nations agreed to voluntarily cut emissions back to 
1990 levels.
 
First, it is too expensive to set up a nuclear plant. Second, nuclear 
power lacks broad-based public support. And third, the long-term safe 
management of nuclear waste is far from being resolved. Among the 
major sources of electricity generation, nuclear power is the most 
expensive. A new nuclear power plant costs three times as much to 
build and run as a new natural gas-fired power plant.

In fact, nuclear power is now even more expensive than many renewable 
energy technologies, including wind, biomass, and geothermal power. 
The only way that this trend could be reversed is if taxpayers 
subsidize nuclear power. That seems unlikely, since public support 
for building new nuclear power plants has all but evaporated.

Money wasted on nuclear power would be unavailable for other, more 
effective ways of preventing global climate change.
------------------

Scans clear UK beaches of radiation  
 
Particles found on nearby beaches are said to relate to past 
incidents 

Radiation scans of two north coast beaches near a nuclear plant have 
not revealed any fresh finds, according to the UK Atomic Energy 
Authority (UKAEA). 

Monitoring teams spent July checking Dunnet and Melvich for signs of 
historic radioactive leaks from Dounreay in Caithness. 

A particle and an unidentified radioactive object were recovered from 
Dunnet Beach in March 2005. 

Last April, a further particle was found at Murkle. 

Nearly all off-site contamination has been detected on the seabed off 
the complex and at Sandside Beach. 

Monitoring of Sandside has been suspended since May. 

Local estate owner Geoffrey Minter barred access to the beach after 
losing patience with the UKAEA's efforts to come up with a plan to 
deal with the contamination. 

The monitoring programme covers beaches at Melvich, Sandside, 
Crosskirk, Brims Ness, Scrabster, Murkle, Peedie and Dunnet. 

A total of 95 particles and an unknown radioactive object have 
previously been recovered from the 4 mile (6km) stretch of sand at 
Sandside.
-----------------

U. of Pittsburgh won't be fined for violations of federal regulations

(The Tribune-Review) Aug 2 - The University of Pittsburgh Medical 
Center won't be fined for its violations of federal radiation therapy 
regulations, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced today. 
A federal inspector in March 2005 found that no medical physicist was 
present at least a dozen times when neurosurgeons performed gamma 
knife radiosurgery procedures at UPMC Presbyterian in Oakland. No 
patients are known to have been harmed. 

In a Federal Register notice published today, the nuclear agency said 
the university has cooperated in tightening controls and improving 
training to prevent future violations. 

UPMC has also hired another medical physicist to ensure it has enough 
staff to support the gamma knife procedures.
----------------

Sandia tests radiation detectors

(CONTRA COSTA TIMES) Aug 1 - Shipping containers filled with 
technology from Sandia National Laboratories could become the latest 
addition to the nation's defense.
Mobile radiation detectors assembled at Sandia/California are being 
tested on ships in transit from Oakland to Honolulu to determine 
whether they can reliably detect nuclear material on those ships 
without many false alarms.

"You've got days on the ocean, and you only get minutes in the port," 
Sandia physicist George Lasche said recently as a detector was being 
prepared for sea. "The alternative is to inspect all these containers 
before they leave foreign ports."

A major challenge in identifying radiological threats on land is 
sorting them out from background radiation.

"It's like trying to hear someone through a crowded restaurant," 
Lasche said.

At sea, there is significantly less background noise. "It's more like 
trying to hear a whisper in a library," he said.

This creates its own challenges, however. Without background 
radiation to compete with, even the amount of natural uranium in 
aluminum can be detected.

"We've gotten rid of the aluminum in our containers, so now I expect 
we'll see all the uranium in beer cans traveling from Oakland to 
Hawaii," Lasche said in a news release. "Any instrument in a real 
deployment must be able to discriminate innocent uranium from 
threatening uranium."

Lasche's team is working on such issues during the test runs. Team 
members are also learning to deal with other potential false alarms 
such as fertilizer.

A total of eight test runs were originally scheduled, but the 
Department of Homeland Security has added several more to test 
additional detection equipment. The containers house an array of 
detectors, including high-purity germanium gamma-ray detectors, 
bonnerspheres neutron spectrometers, fission meter multiplicity 
detectors and muon-neutron correlation detectors.

Matson Shipping Lines agreed to work with Sandia to test the 
detectors in a real shipping environment.

"It sounds very simple, but ships are very, very big things with lots 
of stuff on them," Lasche said. "One of the big goals is to very 
rarely have such a false alarm that we have to stop a ship at sea and 
board it."
------------------

IAEA to visit Japan quake-hit nuclear plant next week 

TOKYO (AFP) - The UN's nuclear watchdog is expected to send experts 
to Japan next week to examine a nuclear power plant damaged during a 
deadly earthquake, officials said Thursday. 
 
"We've heard the IAEA's inspectors will examine the nuclear plant 
from Monday through Thursday and on Friday exchange information with 
Japanese officials in Tokyo," an official at Japan's Nuclear and 
Industrial Safety Agency said.

Japan invited the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency to 
visit its largest nuclear plant in hopes of easing concern at home 
and abroad after the 6.8-magnitude earthquake on July 16, which 
caused a radiation leak.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., has said the 
radiation was far too little to cause health concerns but came under 
criticism for initially underreporting the level.

Japan's government has voiced concern about foreign media coverage of 
the plant incident after Italian soccer club Catania cited worries 
about radiation to cancel a tour of the country.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) 
northwest of Tokyo, is the largest nuclear facility in the world and 
was shut down indefinitely as a precaution after the earthquake.

The Japanese nuclear official said authorities would fully cooperate 
with the IAEA experts.

"We will not instruct them nor suggest anything on their inspections 
so as to guarantee a fair and independent examination," he said.

IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei has said in a statement it 
was important to draw lessons from this case "that might have 
implications for the international nuclear safety regime."

The earthquake killed 11 people and destroyed hundreds of homes.

Despite the risks of earthquakes, Japan has been trying to increase 
its reliance on nuclear power as it has almost no natural energy 
resources of its own.

Tokyo Electric this week slashed its earnings forecast for the full 
financial year due to the earthquake.
------------------

Nuclear waste leak in Washington contained

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) Aug 2 -- Workers are trying to determine how to 
clean up one of the worst radioactive waste leaks in years at the 
Hanford nuclear reservation, officials said.

No workers were con- taminated during last week's accident, and the 
spill was contained within a ti- ny area, posing no threat to the 
public, officials said Tuesday.

The leak was estimated at 50 to 100 gallons, although officials are 
not yet sure how big it was, Delmar Noyes of the federal Energy 
Department told reporters during a conference call.

The spill area has been capped to prevent the waste from becoming 
airborne. A plan to safely dispose of the spill is being developed.

"The release to the environment of this waste material is not 
acceptable," Noyes said.

Noyes said the spill was the largest in the tank farm in years.
-----------------

TVA to expand nuclear operation at Tennessee plant
Watts Bar reactor to cost $2.5 billion

KNOXVILLE (AP) Aug 2 - The Tennessee Valley Authority's board of 
directors pushed aside pleas by environmentalists for further study 
and voted unanimously Wednesday to complete a second nuclear reactor 
at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant on the Tennessee River.

The plant, about 140 miles east of Nashville, was the last nuclear 
plant to come online in the United States when it fired up one of its 
two planned reactors in 1996.
 
Unit 2, idled in mid-construction in 1985 when TVA shut down its 
entire nuclear program over safety concerns, could become the 
country's first new commercial nuclear reactor of the 21st century.

The plan approved by TVA's eight-member board will finish Unit 2 in 
five years at a cost of $2.5 billion, funded by the public utility's 
revenues and adding debt.

Directors approved the plan based on a $20 million internal 
feasibility study that determined the reactor is about 60 percent 
complete. Some questioned TVA using consultants, such as Bechtel 
Power Co., that will want to bid on the work. But TVA officials said 
bids will be judged competitively by an independent team.

TVA is the nation's largest public utility, providing wholesale 
electricity through 158 distributors to about 8.7 million consumers, 
including those in the Midstate, and directly to several dozen large 
manufacturers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, 
North Carolina and Virginia.

Watts Bar Unit 2 would be TVA's seventh nuclear reactor. The agency 
recently restarted a Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant reactor in Alabama, 
also mothballed since 1985, after a $1.8 billion, five-year 
renovation.

"Completing Watts Bar Unit 2 puts an existing asset to work for TVA 
customers and provides a clean, safe and reliable source of 
affordable power to the people of the Tennessee Valley," TVA Chairman 
Bill Sansom said.

"Stop trying to say that this is clean," activist John Johnson of 
Katuah Earth First! said during a four-hour meeting at TVA 
headquarters. "If you think it is clean then I dare you to store fuel 
rods in your basement."

TVA officials didn't discuss the nuclear-waste issue. Instead, they 
pointed to Watts Bar Unit 2's potential to reduce TVA's carbon 
dioxide emissions by up to 8 million tons a year.

TVA is predicting demand growth at nearly 2 percent annually. That 
would require a new nuclear reactor every couple of years unless 
TVA's new commitments to incentive-driven conservation pan out.

Call for delay rejected

Several environmentalists asked TVA directors to delay a vote on 
Watts Bar Unit 2 for a year to weigh the alternatives, while local 
government leaders, TVA distributors and major industrial customers, 
including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, urged TVA to move ahead.

"Utilities across the country are proving they can meet all load 
growth through conservation and efficiency measures rather than 
building new power plants," said Alex Tapia of Nashville, an energy-
conservation advocate with the nonprofit Kilowatt Ours.

TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore said the agency can't afford to 
wait. TVA expects to spend $1.4 billion of some $9.6 billion in 
operating expenses next year on buying electricity from other 
utilities to meet peak needs - up nearly $400,000 from this year.

"We are 3,500 megawatts in the hole if you start today," he said. "We 
are going to be another 3,500 megawatts in the hole five years from 
now. We are going to need this (Watts Bar Unit 2) and all the 
conservation that you can bring on."

TVA directors will vote on their fiscal 2008 budget later this month. 
Kilgore said there could be a single-digit rate increase during the 
year to pay for additional capacity, particularly purchases of 
combined-cycle gas turbine plants.
-----------------

James A. FitzPatrick - Public is silent at final nuclear plant 
meeting 

No questions or comments are made at last hearing on re-licensing 
request.

No one offered a comment or a question Wednesday at the final public 
meeting in Oswego County on re-licensing the James A. FitzPatrick 
Nuclear Power Plant. 

Entergy Nuclear, the owner of the plant in Scriba, has applied to the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a 20-year extension of its 40-year 
license to run the 880-megawatt plant. 

On Wednesday, the NRC held two meetings sharing the preliminary 
findings of its environmental review. The meetings, said Jessie Muir, 
project manager for the environmental review, "are specifically 
structured for public participation." 

The first meeting, at 1:30 p.m., drew employees from the plant as 
well as NRC officials. Muir presented the report's preliminary 
findings, including: 

Ö The environmental impact of continuing to operate the plant's 
cooling system would be small. 

Ö The environmental impact from radiation exposure would be small. 

Ö The environmental impact of the plant's operation on four 
threatened or endangered species on or near the site - the piping 
plover, the massasauga rattlesnake, the bog turtle and the Indiana 
bat - would be small. 

Ö Replacing the energy produced by the FitzPatrick plant could have a 
moderate or large environmental impact. 

According to the report, replacing the plant with solar power would 
take more than 12,000 acres; replacing the plant with wind power 
would require 294 to 881 wind turbines. The output of all wind power 
facilities in the state today is less than a third of what 
FitzPatrick produces, the report said. 

Concluding her remarks on the report, Muir said, "The adverse 
environmental impacts of license renewal for FitzPatrick are not so 
great that preserving the option of license renewal for energy 
planning decision-makers would be unreasonable." 

"Simply put," she said, "license renewal is acceptable from an 
environmental standpoint." 

Two people offered comments after Muir spoke at the 1:30 p.m. 
meeting. 

Michael Stevens, a Scriba resident who is the refueling coordinator 
for FitzPatrick plant, said he was in favor of license extension 
because the plant is closely monitored and regulated, and has "a 
strong safety culture." 

"I'm not here as an employee today," said Stevens, 50, whose home is 
near the plant. "I'll retire long before the license renewal runs 
out." 

Gary Toth, business manager of Carpenters Local 747, spoke in favor 
of the license extension as well. 

"We have a lot of guys that work in the plant," he said. "To a man, 
they've gone in that plant and come out safely." 

At the second, 7 p.m., meeting, Muir gave the same presentation. This 
time, no one from the public spoke about the plant or the re-
licensing. 

The next public meeting on the plant's license renewal will be Sept. 
5 outside of Washington, D.C., when NRC officials will share their 
findings with a panel of experts. 

The NRC will continue to take comments on the environmental impact of 
the re-licensing. 
------------------

Former SRS nuclear engineer sent to prison
Mexican native lied about his credentials

COLUMBIA -- A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a former nuclear 
engineer at the U.S. Savannah River Site to a year in prison after he 
was convicted by a federal jury of lying about his background.

Martin Francisco Salazar, 49, had faced 10 years in prison and a 
$500,000 fine.

Salazar worked beginning about 1985 at the secretive federal facility 
near Aiken, which once helped produce parts for the nation's nuclear 
arsenal, and told authorities he had a degree in mechanical 
engineering and was born in Arizona, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dean 
Eichelberger told The Greenville News earlier this year.

In fact, prosecutors alleged, Salazar was born in Mexico and had no 
mechanical engineering degree.

Officials discovered problems with Salazar's statements about his 
background as the result of a security check in 2001, a periodic 
examination required of those holding a top-secret, or what the 
government calls, a "Q clearance," Eichelberger said.

Eichelberger said Salazar has a "derivative" citizenship, a 
classification due to his birth in Mexico and his mother's birth in 
the United States. He said he didn't know why he told authorities he 
was born in Arizona.

While authorities were investigating his background, Salazar put in 
for early retirement, giving a false year of birth to qualify, 
according to prosecutors.

U.S. District Judge Margaret Seymour sentenced Salazar to 12 months 
in prison and ordered him to repay $20,000 he had received in pension 
money.


 

-----------------------------------------
Sander C. Perle
President
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
2652 McGaw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92614 

Tel: (949) 296-2306 / (888) 437-1714  Extension 2306
Fax:(949) 296-1144

E-Mail: sperle at dosimetry.com
E-Mail: sandyfl at cox.net 

Global Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com/