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A nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois. Taken by photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com). カレンダー
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張 る」から、亡 くなるまで4カ月 …生身 の人間 を苦 しめたトロトラスト知識 ゼロから始 まった「日本 初 の薬害 」の取材 via信濃毎日新聞 2024/02/29 -
福島 第 1原発 で汚染 水 トラブル連発 、経済 産業 相 が東京電力 を指導 「覚悟 が見 えない」地元 もバッサリvia東京 新聞 2024/02/23 - It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast via LA Times 2024/02/21
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仏 で保管 のプルトニウム九州電力 と四国電力 の原発 で利用 へ via NHK News Web 2024/02/17
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最新 の議論 - Leonsz on Combating corrosion in the world’s aging nuclear reactors via c&en
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It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast via LA Times
BY ROSANNA XIA STAFF WRITER
FEB. 21, 2024 5 AM PT
For decades, a graveyard of corroding barrels has littered the seafloor just off the coast of Los Angeles. It was out of sight, out of mind — a not-so-secret secret that haunted the marine environment until a team of researchers came across them with an advanced underwater camera.
Speculation abounded as to what these mysterious barrels might contain. Startling amounts of DDT near the barrels pointed to a little-known history of toxic pollution from what was once the largest DDT manufacturer in the nation, but federal regulators recently determined that the manufacturer had not bothered with barrels. (Its acid waste was poured straight into the ocean instead.)
Now, as part of an unprecedented reckoning with the legacy of ocean dumping in Southern California, scientists have concluded the barrels may actually contain low-level radioactive waste. Records show that from the 1940s through the 1960s, it was not uncommon for local hospitals, labs and other industrial operations to dispose barrels of tritium, carbon-14 and other similar waste at sea.
[…]
And in the process of digging up old records, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered that from the 1930s to the early 1970s, 13 other areas off the Southern California coast had also been approved for dumping of military explosives, radioactive waste and various refinery byproducts — including 3 million metric tons of petroleum waste.
[…]
The company, now defunct, had received a permit in 1959 to dump containerized radioactive waste about 150 miles offshore, according to the U.S. Federal Register. Although archived notes by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission say the permit was never activated, other records show California Salvage advertised its radioactive waste disposal services and received waste in the 1960s from a radioisotope facility in Burbank, as well as barrels of tritium and carbon-14 from a regional Veterans Administration hospital facility.
Given recent revelations that the people in charge of getting rid of the DDT waste sometimes took shortcuts and just dumped it closer to port, researchers say they would not be surprised if the radioactive waste had also been dumped closer than 150 miles offshore.
[…]
The sobering reality, he noted, is that it wasn’t until the 1970s that people started to take radioactive waste to landfills rather than dump it in the ocean.
He pulled out an old map published by the International Atomic Energy Agency that noted from 1946 to 1970, more than 56,000 barrels of radioactive waste had been dumped into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side. And across the world even today, low-level radioactive waste is still being released into the ocean by nuclear power plants and decommissioned plants such as the one in Fukushima, Japan.
“The problem with the oceans as a dumping solution is once it’s there, you can’t go back and get it,” said Buesseler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity. “These 56,000 barrels, for example, we’re never going to get them back.”
[…]
“It’s extremely overwhelming. … There’s still so much we don’t know,” said John Chesnutt, a Superfund section manager who has been leading the EPA’s technical team on the ocean dumping investigation. “Whether it’s radioactivity or explosives what have you, there’s potentially a wide range of contaminants out there that aren’t good for the environment and the food web, if they’re really moving through it.”
Read more.
仏 で保管 のプルトニウム 九州電力 と四国電力 の原発 で利用 へ via NHK News Web
2024
しかし、イギリスでは
このため、
[…]
Congress torpedoes a Biden nominee and casts doubt on nuclear safety via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
By Allison Macfarlane | February 6, 2024
The Biden administration’s recent abandonment of Jeff Baran for another term as member on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) bodes ill for the independence of the agency—and the safety and security of the country. A longtime commissioner, Baran reportedly did not have enough support from some senate Democrats to win another nomination.
His crimes? Being “an overzealous regulator overtly hostile to nuclear energy.”
Senate Democrats say they would prefer a nominee who is not “too focused on safety.” But the NRC is not a pro- or an anti-nuclear group; it’s an independent regulator, whose mission is to protect public health and safety, ensure security, and protect the environment.
Baran’s opponents in the Senate and in public interest groups cited his track record of being the lone NRC commissioner (of five) to consistently vote in favor of more environmental protection and safety. But with the other four votes typically going in the opposite direction, the decisions favored by the nuclear industry often won out. Baran was hardly a threat to the industry. Does the nuclear industry and its supporters really want the NRC to become an echo chamber instead of a balanced and trusted regulator?
[…]
Many in the nuclear industry are hoping to herald a yearned-for renaissance through the commercialization of small modular and advanced reactors. In the United States, none of these reactor designs has ever been constructed, let alone actually demonstrated. That has not stopped the industry and its promoters from claiming that small modular reactors (SMRs) are safer and cheaper than existing large light water reactors—though because they have not been demonstrated, let alone achieved commercial success, the actual costs and safety issues are unknown. For nuclear power supporters, what is holding the industry back from making a dent in fossil fuel usage is the NRC.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
For years, the NRC has worked proactively with the nascent SMR industry, providing guidance as to how to follow the design certification and licensing processes. And recall that Congress structured the NRC as a fee-for-service agency that must recover 90 percent of its budget from fees paid by licensees by law. This means the agency doesn’t get paid until an application is submitted, but regulators have already done a lot of work even before anyone has submitted a license application. And even then, the fees from the agency are a tiny fraction of what it costs to bring a reactor to commercialization. For instance, in the NRC’s Design Certification process, the agency’s fees amount to between 2.5 and 7.5 percent of the total costs of the reactor.
But blaming the NRC for the industry’s woes is a red herring that deflects the real challenges and uncertainties of developing a new technology onto the regulator. Even if the NRC stopped charging fees and gave all license applications a pass on rigorous safety requirements, the SMR industry would still struggle to commercialize its products. That is because the real issue with these reactors is their economics: SMRs are expensive technologies, especially compared to the cheap cost of wind, solar, and natural gas. And costs for renewables keep decreasing every year.
[…]
To be functional, the NRC must have commissioners who have some technical understanding of nuclear facilities they are supposed to regulate. In the past, commissioners have been drawn from the Navy, academia, and other government agencies.
Over the last 20 years, however, the trend has been to tap congressional staffers—who are by definition political and clearly embody a means for members of Congress to interfere with NRC decision-making—to be commissioners. Such a practice has introduced politics directly into agency processes. The agency performs best, however, when it makes reasonably objective decisions based on expert knowledge of a complex technology. The United States should consider itself lucky compared to other nuclear operating nations because it has a diverse pool of nuclear experts to draw from to sit on the regulatory commission. Sadly, the increasing politicization of the NRC’s Senate confirmation process prevents the agency from benefitting from those experts, which undermines the safety of US nuclear facilities.
[…]
It’s in the industry’s best interests to have an independent regulator. As many in the industry say, “an accident anywhere is an accident everywhere.”
Read more.
Advocates demand halt to uranium mine near the Grand Canyon via Salon
he Grand Canyon truly lives up to its name, being the largest canyon on Earth and one of the most popular national parks in America. But due to uranium mining in the area, some advocates are warning it could become the site of a future environmental disaster, which threatens to make one Indigenous village “extinct.”
More than 80 groups signed onto a statement on Monday — representing Indigenous communities, scientists and environmental nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity — directed at President Joe Biden and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, demanding they close the Pinyon Plain uranium mine, which is located near the Grand Canyon.
“We have a choice in front of us. Allowing the Pinyon Plain mine to proceed is subjecting this landscape and its interconnected waters to a legacy of devastation and disregarding the rights of the Indigenous peoples on the land,” Sanober Mirza, Arizona program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in the statement. “Or we can choose a different path — one that holds a promise of protecting the Grand Canyon’s cultural sanctity, its people and natural resources.”
To understand why the mine’s opponents feel so strongly, one can turn to Amber Reimondo, who work as energy director at a conservationist non-profit called the Grand Canyon Trust. Reimondo explained to Salon by email that, on the one hand, Biden permanently banned mining operations on nearly 1 million acres of federal managed lands by creating the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in August 2023. Yet the Pinyon Plain mine was exempt from this prohibition, and Reimondo argues that the impact on the region has been “several fold.”
“The Grand Canyon region as a whole and especially the location of the mine, is deeply significant to Indigenous cultures and is a place where tribal members have conducted ceremonies, collected medicine, hunted, and more, for centuries,” Reimondo said. “The mine also overlies critical and complex [and] not well understood groundwater systems. One aquifer in particular — the Red Wall Muav Aquifer — is the sole source of water for the remote Havasupai Village of Supai inside the Grand Canyon. The mine poses a contamination threat to these groundwater resources not just today, but importantly, after the mine’s mere 28-month operational lifespan has concluded and the mining operator ‘cleans up’ and moves on.”
Supai is so remote, it’s only accessible only by helicopter or an 8-mile mule ride or hike, Reimondo explained, noting that if the newly-oxygenated groundwater comes into contact with nearby rocks, minerals like arsenic and uranium will be dissolved by the groundwater and enter aquifers used by the local community and essential to local ecology, including Havasu Falls. Taylor McKinnon, Southwest Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, expressed similar concerns.
“Ultimately, this mine is going to require political leadership,” McKinnon told Salon in an interview, referring to both the Biden and Hobbs administrations. “Those administration’s agencies have the authority to fix this problem if they so choose, and that’s what they should do.”
[…]
Read more.
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Tagged Arizona, Grand Canyon, Havasupai, indigenous peoples, uranium mining
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A million tons of radioactive waste next to the Ottawa River? You Must Be Kidding via Sierra Club Canada
By Ole Hendrickson, Chair of Board of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation
The Sierra Club Canada Foundation is condemning a Government of Canada decision to allow 80 years’ worth of its accumulated radioactive waste to be put in a gigantic landfill surrounded by wetlands that drain into the Ottawa River, 1 kilometer away.
Partially treated leachate from the landfill would be discharged either into the wetlands or directly into Perch Lake, a 45 hectare water body that feeds into the Ottawa River on the edge of the Canadian Shield.
After a nearly 8-year-long assessment under the 2012 version of the Canadian Environmental Act, Rumina Velshi, ex-president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), signed off on the so-called “Near Surface Disposal Facility” (NSDF) project on January 9, 2024. Ms. Velshi recently attracted media attention for having spent nearly $100k more on travel than the next closest senior bureaucrat over a 19-month period.
Her signature means that a private consortium contracted by the Harper government in 2015, now made up of two US-based multinationals and AtkinsRealis (formerly SNC-Lavalin), can proceed with construction of Canada’s first-ever permanent disposal facility for nuclear reactor waste, for the convenience of the industry and the benefit of its shareholders.
Under a 10-year federal contract worth more than $10 billion, the consortium was given ownership of a former Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) subsidiary called Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL). Under a “Site Operating Company” agreement, CNL must reduce the $8 billion federal nuclear liability as quickly and cheaply as possible. The agreement called for an operating waste facility by 2021, which CNL failed to meet owing to significant opposition from First Nations, citizens’ groups, NGOs, and downstream municipalities. CNL’s owners want shovels in the ground before their contract expires in September 2025.
Wastes proposed for the giant landfill are currently stored in 20-foot intermodal containers, 50-gallon drums, and steel waste boxes. They include radioactively contaminated piping, concrete, asbestos, bricks, and lumber from demolition of old structures; and soils contaminated by past dumping of radionuclides mixed with toxic organic chemicals (including PCBs and dioxins) and heavy metals (cadmium, lead, mercury, etc.) in unlined sand trenches. Industrial wastes shipped to Chalk River from companies across Canada would also go in the landfill.
Large amounts of waste were generated by reactor accidents at Chalk River in 1952 and 1958. Facilities used to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons also suffered accidents. These wastes will remain hazardous for thousands to millions of years.
The NSDF’s proximity to the Ottawa River would ensure that detectable quantities of long-lived, man-made radioactive substances and other toxic wastes will pollute the river in perpetuity. The location was chosen to minimize costs of hauling waste from the dozens of radioactively contaminated structures in the “Active Area” at Chalk River.
Ten Algonquin First Nations, on whose unceded land the facility would be built, have registered their objections in the strongest possible terms. They note that section 29(2) of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires the Government of Canada to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent before disposing of hazardous waste in their territory.
To build the NSDF, CNL would destroy 35 hectares of near old-growth forest adjacent to the Perch Lake wetlands. The forest, unlogged for 80 years, is home to bear dens, a wolf pack, beaver, moose, and turtles. CNL would then blast out the side of a small mountain and install a “plastic geomembrane” it says could contain waste for centuries.
Few Canadians have heard of the NSDF, owing to the heavy veil of secrecy that the Government of Canada maintains over its nuclear installations. It allows unelected CNSC commissioners to make controversial decisions involving nuclear energy, which Parliament declared to be an undertaking “for the general advantage of Canada” under the 1997 Nuclear Safety and Control Act, which has never since been reviewed.
[…]
Read more.
劣化 ウランを蓄電池 「レドックスフロー電池 」に再生 、世界 初 の成果 目指 す via ニュースイッチ
ウランの
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