Security Probe Opens at Los Alamos Lab

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET>]

Index:



Security Probe Opens at Los Alamos Lab

PG&E says has lost track of some spent nuclear fuel

Agency: Hanford Workers Exposed to Vapors

INTERVIEW - New nuclear plants will produce less toxic wast

KEPCO unit signs MOU on Romanian nuclear plant

Agency May Fine Contractor Over Sludge

=========================



Security Probe Opens at Los Alamos Lab



ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - A security probe got under way at the 

troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory, even as more allegations of 

security lapses rolled in.



Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow was expected to visit Monday, 

joining Linton Brooks, director of the National Nuclear Security 

Administration, who arrived Sunday. They are among the federal 

officials inquiring into the disappearance of two electronic data 

storage devices that were reported missing at the lab earlier this 

month.



Brooks' visit came as the lab responded to yet another report of 

security lapses - an unconfirmed, anonymous tip released by the 

Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, reporting that classified 

information had been sent over the lab's unclassified e-mail system 

17 times in recent months.



"The most recent incident," POGO said, "occurred on July 15 when a 

Los Alamos lawyer sent a classified e-mail from his home computer to 

multiple people at Los Alamos."



The lab said Sunday the incident had been reported to the nuclear 

security administration and steps had been taken "prevent significant 

risk to national security." Work at the lab was largely shut down 

over the weekend.



Brooks made no public comment Sunday on the missing devices or the 

investigation. "He's here to conduct a very serious first look at the 

locations involved in this most recent security incident," lab 

spokesman Jim Fallin said Sunday.



Lab director Pete Nanos on Friday called for a stand-down on most lab 

activities. The University of California, which manages the lab for 

the Department of Energy, had ordered him to halt classified work at 

the lab a day earlier.



Nanos said there will be exceptions to his order, so that critical 

missions and essential national security functions continue.



The stand-down is open-ended, with some lab departments expected to 

resume work sooner than others. Nanos said officials will review 

every department's activities and recommend work resume only when all 

compliance issues have been addressed.



Lab and Energy Department officials have said little about the 

missing computer disks or about how they may have disappeared.



Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham ordered Brooks and McSlarrow to 

oversee the inquiry.



Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., members of the 

House Energy and Commerce Committee, also were expected to arrive 

Monday. Messages for the lawmakers seeking comment were not returned 

Sunday.



Los Alamos has been under intense scrutiny since November 2002, when 

allegations surfaced about purchasing fraud, equipment theft and 

mismanagement. The ensuing scandal prompted an overhaul of lab 

business policies and a culling of top managers. The Energy 

Department decided to put its lab management contract up for bid when 

it expires in 2005, possibly ending the University of California's 61-

year involvement.

----------------



PG&E says has lost track of some spent nuclear fuel



LOS ANGELES, July 16 (Reuters) - Pacific Gas & Electric said on 

Friday that it has lost track of the location of three pieces of 

spent nuclear fuel, although the utility said there was no threat to 

public safety.



The San Francisco-based utility, a unit of PG&E Corp. said the 

nuclear fuel was from the now closed Humboldt Bay nuclear plant near 

Eureka in northern California.

------------------



Agency: Hanford Workers Exposed to Vapors



SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - Some workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation 

have been exposed to dangerous vapors from tanks that store 

radioactive waste, a federal report said Friday.



The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health 

investigated complaints from workers that their health was at risk 

when working near the underground tanks containing wastes left from 

the production of nuclear weapons materials.



The employees work for CH2M Hill Hanford Group, a private contractor 

that operates the so-called tank farms on the 586-square-mile 

reservation near Richland.



NIOSH interviewed 54 managers and employees of CH2M Hill Hanford, and 

found that 35 reported acute and chronic health concerns they 

believed were related to the automatic venting of gases from the 

tanks. Workers also worried about a lack of respirators and of 

adequate environmental monitoring.



NIOSH recommended that an air-purifying respirator be provided to any 

worker entering a tank farm, with higher-quality equipment available 

for those entering known vapor-release areas.



The Energy Department's Office of River Protection, which owns 

Hanford, said the NIOSH findings are consistent with other recent 

assessments.



A plan to correct the problems will be developed, the department said 

in a statement, and NIOSH will be asked to return to Hanford to study 

the followup.



Joy Turner, spokeswoman for CH2M Hill Hanford, said the contractor 

will cooperate to bolster worker safety.



Hanford was created as part of the Manhattan Project in World War II 

to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. Nuclear and hazardous wastes 

from decades of plutonium production are stored in 177 underground 

tanks, grouped together in tank farms.



Hanford is now engaged in the cleanup of the nation's largest 

collection of nuclear waste, a $2 billion-a-year job that involves 

some 11,000 workers.



Also Friday, Washington's governor and attorney general said they'll 

ask a federal judge to expand the state's lawsuit against the Energy 

Department, seeking to halt new shipments of low-level radioactive 

wastes to Hanford.



Gov. Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire said the 

department has not fully complied with federal environmental laws, 

and the agency should complete the Hanford cleanup before bringing in 

more waste. Groundwater contamination is a key concern.



In June, the department began shipping low-level radioactive waste to 

Hanford from the Rocky Flats nuclear complex in Colorado.

-----------------



INTERVIEW - New nuclear plants will produce less toxic wast



LONDON, July 16 (Reuters) - A new breed of smaller. more efficient 

nuclear power stations will produce far less radioactive waste, 

according to the head of Mitsui Babcock, a UK-based engineering 

company specialising in the power sector.



If Britain built 10 new 1,100 megawatt nuclear power stations and ran 

them for 60 years, this would add just 10 percent to the country's 

existing nuclear waste stockpile, Iain Miller told Reuters in an 

interview.



Nuclear power hit the headlines this month after Prime Minister Tony 

Blair left the door open to building new plants to help reduce 

greenhouse gas emissions from the power industry.



"New future nuclear designs only produce 10 percent of the 

radioactive waste of old plants, achieving that by a compaction of 

the plant," Miller said.



Waste from nuclear plants includes spent fuel, considered high risk, 

as well as irradiated areas within the plant. New plants would use 

fuel more efficiently and the smaller scale would mean less 

intermediate-risk irradiated material.



"There is the technology now in nuclear and thermal plants to meet 

public needs," Miller said. Nuclear waste would still have to be 

buried underground, he added.



Europe is finding it hard to rule out a future for nuclear power as 

governments face the need to tackle climate change without risking 

future energy security.



Britain relies on nuclear power for around a quarter of its 

electricity generation, but has not built any new plants for over a 

decade and with most of its reactors scheduled to close over the next 

20 years. Its North Sea gas supplies are also dwindling.



Energy Minister Stephen Timms said this month the current economics 

of new nuclear reactors were unattractive and investors were not 

interested in nuclear power.



Investors were burned after the British government recently bailed 

out British Energy, which operates most of the country's nuclear 

plants, since slumping electricity prices pushed it towards 

bankruptcy.



Each new reactor would cost around one billion pounds ($1.85 

billion), and take five years to complete after planning permission, 

according to Mitsui Babcock, a subsidiary of Japan's Mitsui 

Engineering & Shipbuilding Co. Ltd.



"Most of the new designs are evolutions of previous ones -- they are 

built on a modular basis reducing the risk in terms of time. The 

biggest issue is getting planning permission," Miller said.



Environmentalists say building new nuclear plants would add to 

environmental problems given the need to dispose of the radioactive 

waste, and that Europe should instead increase investment in 

renewable energies such as wind and solar power.



Both renewables and nuclear power produce no carbon dioxide, blamed 

for global warming, and the two are competing to be the solution for 

reducing pollution from the electricity sector.



Miller said the UK's investment in new power technology was lagging 

behind the rest of Europe and energy hungry China, which is heavily 

investing in lower emission coal plants.



"The UK has taken the lead in terms of gas but because of that there 

hasn't been much investment in coal and nuclear power," he said. 

"Renewables should play a part. However, going forward, we see CO2 

reduction being linked to efficiency."



New coal-fired plants could produce 20 percent less carbon dioxide 

emissions than existing ones by using higher boiler temperatures and 

pressures, Miller said. He said these emissions could be further 

reduced by burning 10-20 percent biomass fuels, made from 

agricultural and forest products.

------------------



KEPCO unit signs MOU on Romanian nuclear plant



SEOUL, July 16 (Reuters) - Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) 

has signed an agreement with Romania to undertake a joint feasibility 

study on the construction and operation of a nuclear power plant, a 

company spokesman said on Friday.



Korea Hydro, a unit of state-run power monopoly Korea Electric Power 

Corp (KEPCO), has been trying to win lucrative overseas nuclear power 

plant projects in an effort to create new sources of revenue.



The state utility signed a memorandum of understanding on the 700-

megawatt (MW) plant with Romania's state-run nuclear power company, 

the spokesman said.



Korea Hydro is the operator of all 18 nuclear power reactors in South 

Korea, which has the world's sixth-largest nuclear power capacity.



"With the deal, we came a step closer to the possibility of building 

a nuclear power plant in Romania," said the spokesman.



Financial details of the project were not available, the spokesman 

said, but added that it generally costs about 2 trillion won ($1.72 

billion) to build a nuclear power plant.



Romania, which halted construction of the reactor in Cernavoda due to 

financial problems, also signed separate agreements with Atomic 

Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) and Ansaldo Energia of Italy on studies 

for different parts of the project, he added.



Romania currently has only one nuclear power plant, a 750 MW reactor 

located in Cernavoda that came on stream in 1996 and accounts for 10 

percent of the country's total power generation.



Ansaldo, an energy systems unit of Italian defence group Finmeccanica 

that makes turbines, boilers and power stations, is currently 

building a second plant with AECL.



Korea Hydro, which has formed a consortium with other local companies 

to bid for foreign nuclear power projects, is waiting for an expected 

tender by China for four 1,000-MW nuclear power plants costing an 

estimated $6 billion.



Energy-deficient South Korea, which relies on nuclear energy for 40 

percent of its power needs, built its first nuclear power plants 

decades ago with U.S. or European technology, but now has the 

capability to export its own reactors.

-------------------



Agency May Fine Contractor Over Sludge



SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - The Department of Energy on Thursday proposed a 

$935,000 fine against one of its contractors for safety violations in 

a project to remove radioactive sludge from the Hanford nuclear 

reservation.



The department said Fluor Hanford Inc. claimed in 2003 it was 

prepared to begin removing 50 cubic meters of radioactive sludge from 

the reservation but it failed the agency's readiness review.



The department found that company employees were not adequately 

trained, documents and records were incomplete and some of the 

equipment it planned to use was not safe enough.



DOE officials said that if the fine stands, it would be the largest 

civil penalty ever levied at Hanford, which contains the nation's 

largest collection of nuclear waste.



The company has not decided whether to challenge the fine, spokesman 

Geoff Tyree said.



"We are disappointed with the civil penalty, particularly the level 

of the fine, because we have completely turned this project around in 

the past year," Fluor Hanford President Ron Gallagher said in a 

statement Thursday.



The company was hired to remove spent nuclear fuel rods from storage 

basins at the reservation and then clean up the remaining radioactive 

sludge in a separate project.



The company has since passed a readiness review and has begun 

removing the sludge. The company is continuing to remove the 

remaining spent fuel rods.



The 586-square-mile Hanford site, located near Richland in south-

central Washington, was created as part of the Manhattan Project in 

World War II to make plutonium for nuclear weapons.



------------------------------------

Sandy Perle

Sr. Vice President, Technical Operations

Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.

3300 Hyland Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626



Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100  Extension 2306

Fax:(714) 668-3149



E-Mail: sperle@dosimetry.com

E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net



Personal Website: http://sandy-travels.com/

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



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