Nuclear Waste:  Bush Signs Yucca Mountain Resolution

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a joint congressional resolution today designating Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the site of the first long-term U.S. nuclear waste repository (see GSN, July 17).

“The successful completion of the Yucca Mountain project will ensure our nation has a safe and secure underground facility that will store nuclear waste in a manner that protects our environment and our citizens,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a statement.

A Senate vote earlier this month overturning Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn’s veto of the site resulted in final congressional approval for the Yucca Mountain project (see GSN, July 10).  The House of Representatives had overturned Guinn’s veto in May (see GSN, May 9).

Nevada officials have said they plan to continue fighting the repository plan in the courts.  They have already filed five lawsuits to block the plan (see GSN, July 11).

“We knew after the Senate vote that this was going to happen.  This was a mere formality,” said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.  “For us, it’s on to the legal arena” (Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, July 23).

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Uranium Enrichment:  Group Seeks to Build Plant, Break USEC Monopoly

A consortium of European and U.S. companies said yesterday that it plans to apply for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a $1.1 billion plant for enriching uranium for nuclear power plants in the United States (see GSN, Dec. 10, 2001).

The consortium, known as Louisiana Energy Services, includes Westinghouse Electric Co., Fluor Daniel, Exelon, Entergy, Duke Energy, the British-Dutch-German company Urenco and Canada’s Cameco Corp.  The group is considering building the plant at one of a few sites that are already licensed for nuclear uses, in particular in Lynchburg, Va., Wilmington, N.C., or Erwin, Tenn.  The plant would be operational by 2007 or 2008 (Matthew Wald, New York Times, July 23).

The proposed facility, which would be able to supply up to a quarter of the U.S. demand for enriched uranium by 2012, would use centrifuge technology developed and used by Urenco.  Centrifuge facilities are currently located only in Europe and Russia, according to the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.  The centrifuge process for enriching uranium is considered better than the alternative gaseous diffusion process because it requires only 2 percent of the energy used in diffusion (Murray Lyons, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 23).

Competition

The only company that currently provides domestically produced enriched uranium for U.S. plants is the U.S. Enrichment Corp., which runs a plant in Paducah, Ky.  USEC’s 1950s-built diffusion plant forces gaseous uranium through a barrier that separates uranium-235 and uranium-238.  USEC produces much of its supply of fuel-grade uranium not through an enrichment process but by blending down uranium from Russian nuclear weapons (see GSN, June 20; Wald, New York Times).

The United States would probably prefer to have more of its uranium supply produced in the United States rather than imported from Europe or Russia, Cameco Chief Operating Officer Bernard Michel said (Lyons, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 23).

If the consortium were to build the proposed enrichment facility, USEC’s monopoly on domestic enriched uranium would end, the New York Times reported.  USEC won a trade case this year to impose tariffs on two European uranium suppliers, but those tariffs would not apply to a plant built in the United States with European technology (see GSN, Jan. 23).

“As a business, they are dead,” Thomas Neff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said of USEC.  If the company does not build an enrichment plant, it will become only a broker of Russian uranium, he said.

The consortium has better technology, chairman Patrick Upson said.

“We have a significant head-start on the technical side,” he said.

USEC said a month ago that it wants to build a plant once it modernizes a prototype plant tested in the 1980s.

“USEC remains the leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel in the United States market, and we’re on track to be enriching uranium using new advanced gas centrifuges by the end of the decade,” USEC spokesman Charles Yulish said.  “We expect our technology to be proven the most efficient in the world” (Wald, New York Times).

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Radiological Weapons:  Pirates Raid Radioactive Materials

Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups are behind an increase of piracy against ships transporting radioactive materials through the Malacca Straits between Indonesia and Malaysia, the Bangkok Post reported today.

According to Panithan Watthanayakorn of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, the organizations are trying to obtain enough radioactive material to construct a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive laced with the radioactive substances (see GSN, July 1).

“The straits are very narrow and there are no patrol vessels, so it is easy for terrorist groups to attack ships,” Panithan said.  The pirates usually know the ship’s route and trap it by mooring a vessel on each side, he said.

Panithan has studied information from the International Maritime Bureau, which listed 649 cases of piracy in the straits last year.  He said Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers group is another group trying to obtain radioactive materials through piracy.  Panithan called on Southeast Asian countries to increase cooperation to end piracy and called on countries around the world to fight the piracy threat (Anucha Charoenpo, Bangkok Post, July 22).

U.S. Team Practices Dirty Bomb Response

Meanwhile, a U.S. national emergency team plans to practice responding to a dirty bomb threat this week in Albuquerque, N.M., the Albuquerque Journal reported Saturday (see GSN, July 15).

In the exercise, the team’s responders will begin searching the city after receiving an intelligence report that terrorists are planning a radiological attack.  They will then receive a report of an explosion with orders to determine whether any radioactive material is mixed in with the debris and how far it has spread (see GSN, July 11).

The exercise will involve no actual explosions or radioactive materials, coordinator Jim Straka said.  Team members will use computers to set off responders’ radiation detectors.

The team has practiced responding to radiological accidents in the past, but the upcoming exercise will be the first time they have practiced responding to a dirty bomb, Straka said (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, July 20).

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