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NRC Chairman Resigns
After years of accusations of creating a 'chilled work environment,' Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko resigned this morning (PDF). His largest achievement was perhaps killing the Yucca Mountain waste repository, and he oversaw the certification of the AP1000 reactor. It is unknown whether a new chairman will be appointed from within the NRC. Quoting the Washington Post: "The reason for his resignation is unclear. He is stepping down before the release of a second inspector general report rumored to be into allegations of Mr. Jaczko's misconduct. NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner told The Washington Times that the report had no impact on the timing of Mr. Jaczko's resignation announcement. Mr. Jaczko's statement was vague, saying that it 'is the appropriate time to continue my efforts to ensure public safety in a different forum. This is the right time to pass along the public safety torch to a new chairman...' While his statement did not specifically touch on the embarrassing revelations of his tyrannical approach to the job or its impact on NRC staff, he did sound a defiant note by claiming the NRC was 'one of the best places to work in the federal government throughout my tenure.'"
Today also marks the start of the annual nuclear industry conference.
In case anyone was wondering.
This is what he deserves for pressuring Sony to fire Community creator Dan Harmon. #sixseasonsandamovie
Because for a minute there I was really worried about the Norwegian Refugee Council.
a "chilled work environment" is a great thing for any NOC. maybe NRC not so much...
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
It appears to be just as good a place as any to dispose of nuclear waste..... certainly better than leaving it in the plants, waiting for a disaster (like Fukushima where some of the stored waste was washed out to sea). Stupid politicians. Yucca has been shown to be stable. Just do it.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
it's always "the appropriate time to continue ... efforts ... in a different forum" when you're about to be slammed with "allegations of ... misconduct."
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
I guess people were on him to get angry enough to go nuclear and have a meltdown..
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
Maybe the people whining about how safe nuclear waste storage is should volunteer to keep it in their basement.
You win! The first NIMBY comment of the article!
And what is your prize you might wonder? Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt by the hogshead.
Please sir, tell us, how do you plan to spend your winnings?
Hell, if the US government wants to pay me for it, they can store it in my basement. Those travel canisters they use are as damn near to indestructible as you can get. And the armed guards they'd have to supply would take care of any security monitoring I'd want.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You may be right, but also consider this. Commissioner Svinicki, a Republican, is up for re-nomination. Reid has already committed to letting her renomination vote come to the floor. With Jaczko timing his announcement now, it now gives Reid a lot more leverage with Republicans in being able to hand pick another anti-Yucca mountain lackey. The wildcard is whether Obama will nominate that lackey as Chairman, or whether he will nominate Commissioner Magwood.
We need a number of new reactors. In particular, we need the micro to medium size reactors that can be built in a factory. In addition, we need GE's IFR (to burn up nuke 'waste'), as well as thorium reactors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If we'd actually build some modern reactors, we'd not really need Yucca, honestly. Most that waste can be burnt up for more energy. Eventually, sure, Yucca.. but a much lesser quantity would be stored there. Enough that it'd really not be an issue for decades whether or not we shove it in there or not.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I don't see how it's possible to whine about a positive thing.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I htought the entire point of Yucca mountain was to store the valuable "waste" for when we decided it was OK to use it (in a breeder reactor).
If you do the sane thing and let spent nuclear fuel sit on site for a few years, it won't be "hot" any more, and can be handled like any industrial waste - toxic, sure, but nothing special. It's just that this particular waste is a strategic resource, against a future where we'd need to start stockpiling nukes at cold war levels once more.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A house committee watched while Jaczko's four fellow NRC board members, two of which were appointed by Obama, publicly condemned him while sitting to his immediate left and right. In recent congressional history, that scene is only trumped by Vollmer claiming executive privilege.
Understand that their world, political appointees near the very top of regulatory bureaucracy, is one of connections. You don't do dramatic things in public unless you really, really mean it, because whatever you do will be with you forever. Jaczko has to be some kind of way over-the-top SOB to wind up in that situation before Congress.
He's never offered one genuine, unqualified note of concession about any of it. Everyone else is wrong. "I believe strongly in safety" is as close as he's ever gotten to an explanation. Turning the NRC board of commissioners into a snake pit is somehow supposed to promote safety.
You-know-who will just foist another anti-energy extremist on the NRC after the election, so don't bet on any improvement.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Well, if I lived in a place where "basement" was more than just a word in a dictionary, I wouldn't mind it at all.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We know that Obama is very serious about global warming, because in a speech he said we need to consider all low-carbon energy sources "including nuclear".
And the actual policy changes coming out of the Obama administration? Almost total opposition to all things nuclear, and scuttling the waste storage at Yucca Mountain. Why, it's almost as if Obama is actually opposed to nuclear power.
It remains to be seen if Obama actually believes in global warming, in which case his policy seems to be "destroy energy sources without creating any new ones", or if he just says whatever he thinks will help him at the current moment, and doesn't actually believe it.
Much as I hate dishonesty, I think I'm more worried if our president thinks destroying energy sources without viable replacements is the right thing to do, especially during a depression. Worst yet would be if he really believes that solar, wind, and tidal power are viable replacements for a large coal plant or a nuclear plant.
I'm afraid you're in for disappointment if you do more reading. Yucca was for permanent storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Original_standard
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Ship it to France.
Apparently they have the facilities to reprocess it into new usable fuel for their reactors.
Apparently America is too stupid to do the same.
First off, it never should have been built in Nevada. The best site was west Texas. But it was a decision that Poppa Bush made, hence the reason why NV was chosen.
Second, there is loads of energy in nuclear 'waste'. We should be burning it up. Right now, we are talking about transporting loads of 'waste' all over the USA. Instead, on all of the sites that are to be retired, we could instead put up a number of new GE IFR reactors. These would then be loaded with a small amount of normal nuke fuel, that is then mixed with on-site waste. Then in the future, nothing but on-site 'waste' fuel would be added. So, would there be waste from this? Absolutely. But NONE of it would be useful for a regular bomb (but it would work for a dirty bomb). In addition, the worst of it would be done within 200 years, rather than 20,000 years.
Note the difference with this approach. Basically, you have a site that has active cooling, transmission lines, generators, etc. and some old reactors. You put up enough GE reactor to replace one or more of the old ones, start it, and then start the destruction of one or more of the old reactors. Basically, you keep the site going to provide power. At the same time, we put up a NEW reactor that is based on a NEW design with physics behind it that prevents melt downs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Note that none of the criticism was about technical issues, it was all about "style". Jaczko was publicly critical about failings in the safety culture at the NRC and the industry, and his position became more pronounced after Fukushima. He was saying that we were at risk for a similar accident because the NRC was not holding the reactor operators to a high enough standard. So if his concern about poor risk management is correct, and they want to get rid of him, the best option is a personal attack, which is exactly how this is playing out.
In that vein, there were just a reports on KCBS in Southern California about serious safety lapses at the now closed San Onofre nuclear plant:
If that isn't bad enough, the NRC is now cutting back on evacuation planning requirements.
Given this context, there is a good case to be made that Jaczko being forced out is an example of how meaningful criticism is punished by inbred bureaucrats. This is exactly the same mechanism that lead the Japanese regulators to ignore tsunami warnings at Fukushima and make equally bad decisions about on site back up power.
Don't be surprised when we have a serious nuclear accident here in the US. With this kind of broken regulation, it is inevitable.
Why is Snark Required?
His position got nuked.
Yucca was for permanent storage.
It's not hard to change that. The special case of reprocessing vitrified fuel might be cumbersome, but Yucca can act as a temporary storage too for used fuel rods.
There is a lot of volatile, dangerous stuff like Cs-135, Cs-137, and Sr-90 with half lives short enough to be hot as hell and long enough to be around for a while that you can't burn up for fuel because it has almost no neutron cross section. I find the idea that these can be efficiently transmuted in a MSR is highly optimistic.
Unfortunately, everything that Obama has actually done shows a path to reducing energy availability and energy use rather than changing the way energy is generated in the US. He has said openly that he wants to financially destroy coal generation, and I believe him. No changes have been made in the licensing and permitting process for nuclear generation, which means a very small group of people (one, perhaps?) can block construction at any point in the process.
Obviously he believes in two things: AGW is real, and resource use in the US is out of line with the rest of the world and must be reined in.
As the Republican candidate for president can only win if people are so totally disgusted with Obama that it is "Obama Must Go"
(OMG!), there is a substantial chance that we will be looking at the next four years where energy use becomes more expensive and less reliable. Reliability is the key because businesses will be forced to self-generate in some manner without a reliable external source. Homes will go the same route for people with the money to do so - how many times can you tolerate a blackout for eight or more hours? And what would it really take for you to be able go off-grid?
The real problem is going to be for people that simply do not have the disposible income to invest in solar or wind systems. For example, anyone living in an apartment complex in the northern part of the US - solar simply isn't practical for the building owners and so the tenants are going to be at the mercy of whatever is left over after commercial interests get priority on electricity during the day. You will have a remote switch on your meter to simply turn off your electricity soon.
I htought the entire point of Yucca mountain was to store the valuable "waste" for when we decided it was OK to use it (in a breeder reactor).
Yucca was a political solution that didn't meet the original DOE specifications for appropriate geology, until the specifications were revised. Recent research has shown that the original "Defence in Depth" approach the DOE were advocating was indeed the correct one, i.e. Granite. Radio isotopes that leak out of the containment are captured by the geology. Further - a granite containment is also the ideal place for a systematic reactor like IFR (Integral means the reprocessing is done on site) which also mean the energetic return of the reactor is improved by being able to dispose of the reactor in situ. Unfortunately Yucca is Pumice.
Idaho only got Yucca because one of their representatives didn't show up, so by default the vote went against them. A much better approach is a containment facility based on good science and engineering.
If you do the sane thing and let spent nuclear fuel sit on site for a few years, it won't be "hot" any more, and can be handled like any industrial waste - toxic, sure, but nothing special. It's just that this particular waste is a strategic resource, against a future where we'd need to start stockpiling nukes at cold war levels once more.
This is the standard procedure anyway, the spent fuel is thermally hot so it has to cool for many years before containment and transport is possible.
In any case a good burner reactor program has it's foundation in an strong containment policy. For example a facility like NORAD in the Rocky mountains would be a similar construction project that could include research and commercial burner reactors, fuel, reprocessing and disposal of fissile ash could all be conducted on site. However you only get the energetic return if you can dispose of the reactor by sealing it in the mountain thus avoiding all the energy spent when decommissioning the reactor.
Based on current estimates of the U.S's pu-239 and u-238 reserves, a program like this could provide electric power for America for roughly 5000 years whilst providing approximately one third more electricity than current reactor programs provide and a powerful option for worldwide Nuclear weapons disarmament.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Obviously he believes in two things: AGW is real, and resource use in the US is out of line with the rest of the world and must be reined in.
I could believe this up until the point where the administration refuses to invest in wind and solar solutions that cannot viably provide the energy needed for the most basic needs of the American populace. Not only invest in it but continually fail due to their inability to comprehend market competition and/or solution oriented systems for most of America. Even Obama's supposed home town of Chicago could never rely on wind or solar to solve any significant percentage of its energy needs due to the low return dependent on climate for those technologies.
If someone in the current administration believed that AGW was real they would be champions for liquid flouride thorium reactor (LFTR) technologies. Small footprint systems, can burn nuclear waste, cannot meltdown, cannot make weapons-grade elements. I believe that these could be produced for far less than comparable densities of other carbon-free energy technologies. Yet we continue to ignore technology in favor of a politically controlled "public" energy utilities packed with fairly obvious positions of payoff that look to the future by using whatever energy creation method makes them the most money.
You seem to be referring to #1 here - .5% fuel efficient vs 99.5% for MSRs with on site fuel reprocessing. The same can be said for using LWR models that burn nuclear waste, such as the one Bill Gates proposed at TED a couple of years back, which I believe is being built in Russia.
1) burning nuclear waste in an MSR - you still have lots of junk left over from the LWR, but at least you use the waste fuel, and LWRs are only
2) burning new fuel, specifically thorium enriched to uranium in an MSR - this doesn't generate the long term wastes (as I recall, the worst decays in hundreds of years, no thousands), but does generate some shorter term waste with high signature. This actually is not necessarily bad - as I also recall there is no easy way to separate one of these elements from Uranium, making a high signature identifier that deters its use in nuclear weapons.
LFTR is ignored because the nuclear lobby is entirely backed by owners of light water reactors. It would be stupid for them to back competing technology - heck, they used their leverage to get Jakczko ousted because he was pro safety and they were pro profit. One of the previous lobby groups (the current lobby is a amalgamation of several separate ones from the 1970s) also managed to get Nixon's ear to get Weinberg ousted from Oak Ridge in the 1970s when he wanted us to invest more in molten salt reactors in the name of safety (Weinberg invented the LWR and was running the MSRE or molten salt reactor experiment at the time). Once again, the almighty dollar trumps safety, because as BP proved with their oil well (not to mention numerous refinery issues before the disaster, like the Texas City one that killed 15 people), profits are much more valuable than safety.
southern california also has precious few basements, for some reason.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Sure, it's not technically hard to change course. Politically, of course, it's a nightmare, because the fuel would have to be moved to a reprocessing plant.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You've completely missed my point. Why are we storing it in the first place? Because it's valuable. It's for "permanent storage" in the same way that Fort Knox is for "permanent storage" of gold.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My point is that no, that's not why we are storing it. I wish that were so, but it isn't. We're storing it because it's dangerous and we're incompetent to do anything better with it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nah, though people get all irrational about the hazards of "nukular" anything. Once the short-lived isotopes have burned themselves out, it's just run-of-the-mill toxic waste, only dangerous because it's concentrated.
Spent nucluear fuel is quite valuable, however, and if we ever need to go on a nuke building spree sometime in the future, it's a strategic asset.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.