Nuke dump shutdown lacks master plan, report says The U.S. Department of Energy is moving quickly with no master plan to shut down a project that would have buried the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, the department's inspector general said in a report made public Friday.

Energy Dept. official: No master plan for Yucca closure
The Department of Energy has no master plan to guide the closure of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada, according to a memorandum from Gregory Friedman, the agency's inspector general. Friedman was reportedly informed in March that the agency was drafting a master plan for the project's termination. But in June, he added, he was told that "events were moving so quickly that no further action on the master plan was contemplated." The Seattle Times/The Associated Press
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012434426_apnvnuclearwastesite1stldwritethru.html

The Dreaded Government Bureaucrat Speaks July 22, 2010 at 4:42PM by John H. Richardson

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Damn Washington elites. Technocrats and bureaucrats, every one of them. So sez the American people:

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nuclear-regulatory-commission-interview-072210?src=rss#ixzz0ujiPngHXhttp://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nuclear-regulatory-commission-interview-072210?src=rss#ixzz0ujiPngHX

Damn Washington elites. Technocrats and bureaucrats, every one of them. So sez the American people:
According to a new Politico poll, 45 percent of "Washington elites" say the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while only 25 percent of the general population agrees. Not surprisingly then, according to Rasmussen, 68 percent of voters believe the nation's "political class" doesn't care what most Americans think. 
This disconnect helps explain why only 23 percent of voters believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed. 
This must bring joy to the hearts of Republicans, who have been attacking Washington elites for about a million years. It even provoked a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on the New York Times op-ed page the other day, with Bob Herbert attacking the competence of nuclear regulators on the left side of the page and David Brooks on the right side attacking the entire government for a "technocracy boom" (1,200 separate agencies in national defense alone!) that is, he said, based on the undying liberal belief that regulators can "impose rules, rationality and order" on our complex economy.
So I called up one of those dreaded technocrat regulators, a gen-u-wine government bureaucrat named Scott Burnell. He works for the most technocratic of all our government technocracies, a group passionately dedicated to imposing rules and order on  private business — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
ESQUIRE: Republicans and Tea Party types are calling for the abolition of the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Is anyone calling for the abolition of the NRC?
SCOTT BURNELL: The short answer is no. I'd be very surprised to find someone who feels the NRC is unnecessary.
ESQ: Why can't companies just regulate themselves? After all, they must know that a meltdown would be devastating for their industry. Shouldn't we trust the free market?
BURNELL: To the best of my knowledge, even our harshest critics on either side do agree we are performing a necessary function. Nuclear power provides a great benefit to society, but it does have potential risks that need to be regulated against.
ESQ: But nuclear power has never had a serious accident or killed a single civilian in the United States, and the oil industry just polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico.
BURNELL: That's a very accurate assessment — the accident at Three Mile Island did release materials into the environment but at levels that did not affect public health. Contrast that to the situation in the Gulf.
ESQ: Even so, why should the federal government be the one to do the regulating? Shouldn't each state be able to run its own nuclear power system?
BURNELL: I'm going to have to split a hair here — when it comes to licensing the use of radioactive materials for nuclear power, the NRC is the sole authority in the U.S. But  there are other aspects of operating a nuclear power plant — utility regulations, water use permits — that fall under state purview. So it is a bit of a split decision.
[Burnell took a moment to fill me in on the NRC's background. It was established in 1975 with the mission of protecting public health and the environment from nuclear hazards. Its budget was trickling along at around $800 or $900 million for years but bumped up to just over a billion as the result of a surge of applications for new plants in the last five years. They have more than four thousand employees, almost all of them eggheads of one type or another — nuclear engineers, of course, but also electrical engineers, civil engineers, biologists, mechanical engineers, experts in the laws relating to nuclear power and environmental policy, and computer specialists. Many of them have masters and doctoral degrees.
In other words, the exact scourge feared by David Brooks: "a large cast of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have created ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts."]

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nuclear-regulatory-commission-interview-072210?src=rss#ixzz0ujjGp4kN

Is The U.S. Vulnerable To A Nuclear Attack?

http://warnewsupdates.blogspot.com/2010/07/is-us-vulnerable-to-nuclear-attack.html

New Report: U.S. Vulnerable to a Nuclear Attack -- American Power

See, "Report by the Joint Defense Science Board and the Threat Reduction Advisory Committee Task Force." And the related discussion thread here:http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/NWE-National-Enterprise.pdf

    The United States is now woefully unprepared for any kind of nuclear attack ...

    and the Obama administration has taken steps to further reduce the nation's nuclear arsenal.

    The problem and the cause ...

Report: U.S. Vulnerable to a Nuclear Attack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9uG7bsIeo0&feature=player_embedded

Iran to Step Up Nuclear Fusion Research from VOA News: Top Stories by Edward Yeranian

The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, said Saturday that his country is stepping up its research on nuclear fusion in a bid to produce alternative sources of energy.  The announcement comes as world powers pressure Tehran to suspend its controversial nuclear activities. Salehi said Tehran plans to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor and had hired 50 scientists to work on the project, and that $8 million had been allocated for what he called "serious" research.

Nuclear fusion is a process in which light atomic particles, such as hydrogen, are combined to form heavier particles that release a great amount of energy.  However, this type of atomic reaction has not been successfully developed for commercial power, despite five decades of intensive research.

In 2006, global powers agreed to spend more than $12 billion to build an experimental fusion reactor in the south of France.  That accord was signed by the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Salehi, who has a doctorate from MIT, claimed that Iran's project would require intense effort, but could provide Tehran with large dividends in diversifying its sources of civilian energy. He says that nuclear fusion is a new technology, and that it needs intense effort to develop.  He adds that it will take 20 to 30 years to commercialize nuclear fusion, but that Iran will try to use its resources to achieve that goal sooner.

Nuclear fusion is also the technology behind thermonuclear explosions used in hydrogen bombs.  Such weapons are more powerful than ordinary atomic bombs, which rely on fission reactions.

Asghar Sediqzadeh, who was appointed to run Iran's new fusion research center, told Iranian television that it would take two years to conclude initial studies, followed by another 10 years to design and build a fusion reactor.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Iran-to-Step-Up-Nuclear-Fusion-Research-99171859.html

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• Iran studies building nuclear fusion reactor (ctv.ca)

Covert Action Suspected In Iranian Nuclear Troubles -- Global Security Newswire

Iran's uranium enrichment work has encountered a number of technical
difficulties in the last year, prompting experts to speculate over
what role clandestine interference might have played in the troubles,
the Financial Times reported yesterday (see GSN, July 22).

The U.N. Security Council and various governments have adopted
punitive measures aimed at pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment,
a process that could produce nuclear-weapon material as well as fuel
for civilian applications. Tehran has maintained its atomic ambitions
are strictly peaceful.

Read more ....http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100723_4215.php

See also:

Suggestions of Iran nuclear sabotage
By James Blitz and Roula Khalaf in London and Daniel Dombey in Washington
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dc135fc6-95af-11df-b5ad-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss

Sabotage Slowing Iran Nuke Progress? CIA Won't Say
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/06/sabotage-slowing-iran-nuke-progress-cia-wont-say.html

Who Killed the Climate Bill? We asked the experts who is to blame.

Disarmament for Some Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM

Nuclear power plans in the Gulf and beyond

Nuclear power plans in the Gulf and beyond

Nuclear energy and the global energy crisis — U.S.-Russian cooperation can help

Opinion: U.S., Russia should sign nuclear pact
The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is only the most recent symbol of a far-reaching global energy crisis. Coping with this economic, national security and environmental crisis will be one of humanity’s greatest challenges in the 21st century. There is no magic bullet: Every energy technology will be sorely needed — including nuclear energy.

Russia, the United States and other countries must cooperate to enable large-scale growth of nuclear energy around the world while achieving even higher standards of safety, security and nonproliferation than are in place today. This will require building a new global framework for nuclear energy, including new or strengthened global institutions.

Without such a new framework, unbridled competition in nuclear energy could pose grave risks. Even a single catastrophe — whether a Chernobyl-scale accident, a successful sabotage (a “security Chernobyl”) or, worse yet, a terrorist nuclear bomb — would doom any prospect for nuclear growth on the scale needed to make a significant contribution to coping with climate change.

It is time for the U.S. and Russia to forge a nuclear-cooperation deal that would boost the global growth of nuclear energy while improving safety standards and allaying security concerns, write Evgeniy P. Velikhov and Matthew Bunn in this column. It is better if the two countries, which together possess the world's largest contingent of nuclear resources, to work with rather than against each other, the writers argue. The Hill/Congress blog

US Senate panel OKs DOE funding bill with no Yucca Mountain money

The US Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a spending
bill for the Department of Energy that provides $10 billion in loan guarantee
authority for nuclear projects and, in keeping with the Obama administration's
request, eliminates funding for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste
repository in Nevada.
Overall, the bill, which passed on a party-line vote, 17-12, would give
DOE $28.3 billion for fiscal 2011, just slightly less than the $28.4 billion
that the White House requested, but about $1.7 billion more than the
department's fiscal 2010 funding level.
Most of that increase would go to nuclear weapons programs overseen by
DOE's National Nuclear Safety Administration.
Most of the reductions below the White House's requested amounts came
from DOE's science research and nuclear environmental clean-up programs.
The nuclear loan guarantee authority is less than half of the $25 billion
in authority a House subcommittee gave DOE last week. The Obama administration
had requested $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantee authority.

NRC CIO: Agency has been a model for transparency

NRC CIO: Agency has been a model for transparency
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been committed to transparency for more than three decades, said Darren Ash, the agency's chief information officer. The agency strives to improve its transparency, he said, and he could help other agencies do the same. FederalNewsRadio.com

GLE confident as new laser process advances

The issue of whether NRC should be making nonproliferation evaluations etc. has not been resolved. Consequently I am posting the entire article:

Enriching uranium using laser technology. Sounds pretty advanced, doesn't it?
It will, in fact, be the technology's first commercial use if Global Laser Enrichment wins a license from regulators to build and operate such a plant in Castle Hayne.

Scrutiny continues of the plant's potential effects on the environment. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held two hearings Thursday in Wilmington on its draft environmental impact statement on the project, and the regulator has shown confidence that the effect will be small.

But security is another factor that has drawn interest in recent days, and that involves more than guards at the gate.

Protecting against proliferation – as in nuclear proliferation – starts with the technology licensed to GE for commercial development, said Tammy Orr, CEO of Global Laser Enrichment. That's the company, under GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, that seeks to make laser enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel a successful, salable commodity.

The technology was classified by the U.S. and Australian governments in 2000, Orr said Thursday. The governments also signed the Silex Treaty, which continues to protect the technology, she added.

"We entered the process in 2006. At that time there were several government agencies involved to ensure that it was going to be acceptable for us to develop and deploy technology in the U.S.," she said.

"The decision was made that it was acceptable to move forward because all the protections were in place," Orr continued. "The protection regimes are established by the U.S. government and various agencies.

"We put in place a security program that meets the requirements and mostly exceeds the requirements of those regulations," she continued.

Orr said, however, that "there is discussion in the non-proliferation community about whether the NRC should become involved in non-proliferation.

"That's something that the government is going to address. Today this is an area where the government already has responsibility for across various agencies," she said.

Currently the NRC inspects facilities, after they have been built, for security of material, technology and the facilities themselves, said Roger Hannah, senior public affairs officer for the NRC who attended Thursday's environmental hearings.

But assessing proliferation concerns is not part of the regulator's licensing process, he explained.

Arms control advocates fear that commercialization of the technology could lead other countries to follow suit, raising concerns about the technology falling into the wrong hands, according to a report in the Washington Independent Wednesday.

"Countries like Iran ...have worked in the past to develop laser enrichment programs, and the experts fear successful commercialization of the technology in the U.S. would ... lead them to redouble their efforts," the article said.

But Hannah said everything that surrounds the laser technology and work on it is highly classified.

"We don't foresee any delays in the licensing process," Orr said. "We expect, based on NRC's most recent statements, we could complete the licensing effort by the end of next year."

Wayne Faulkner: 343-2329

NRC reports no abnormal events at US NPSs in fiscal 2009

NRC: U.S. nuclear stations had no abnormal events in fiscal 2009
No incidents involving a major risk to public health and safety occurred at commercial nuclear power stations between May 2009 and April of this year, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Nuclear Engineering International (7/23)

Russia to build nuclear reactors in India under nuke pact

NEW DELHI, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said here Friday that Russia will build nuclear reactors and supply fuel and waster disposal to India under the nuclear cooperation pact with New Delhi.

"Cooperation with India in nuclear energy will include building reactors, supply of the fuel and waste disposal," Putin said during a video-conferencing session with Indian businessmen.

Putin, who is on a one-day visit to India, said that he sees nuclear power generation in India as a promising area of cooperation between Moscow and New Delhi.

"This is one of our major, far-reaching, promising areas of interaction," Putin said.

Easing concerns about safety of the Russian reactors, Putin said: "The new generation of nuclear reactors developed in Russia have been used in several sites in the Russian Federation and are considered among the safest in the world."

Ten nuclear reactors to use top technology

BEIJING, July 6 (Xinhaunet) -- China, which is currently building the largest number of nuclear power stations worldwide, is expected to use one of the most advanced technologies for constructing 10 of its nuclear reactors, an energy official said on Monday.

The technology, called AP1000 from US-based nuclear power company Westinghouse, is a third-generation nuclear system. Compared with other reactors already in use in China, those using the third-generation technology are considered to be safer and able to operate longer.

The AP1000 technology will be used on six reactors at three inland nuclear plants in Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi provinces - the country's first batch of inland nuclear power projects.

The technology will also be applied for two pairs of reactors, one in Sanmen in coastal Zhejiang province, and the other in Haiyang, Shandong province, said the official who did not want to be named because of security issues.

Future inland projects are also set to use the same technology and Chinese authorities are considering the AP1000 as a standard, he said.

"The technology will upgrade China's nuclear power industry, which is seeing its fastest development now," the official said.

Construction of the projects will need final approval from the central government, he said.

The plan to use advanced technology for more nuclear reactors is in line with the rapid development of the country's nuclear power sector, analysts said. More at:

Senate Shelves Climate Legislation

Senate Shelves Climate Legislation

Senate Democrats shelved plans for climate legislation (LAT), probably ending hopes for broad action this year on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and other measures. The Senate will instead focus on a scaled-back plan focused on the BP oil spill, money for home-energy retrofits, and land and water conservation. See
Bowing to political reality, Senate Democrats drop broad energy bill
Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledges there aren't enough votes and instead will offer a scaled-back measure focused on the gulf oil spill.

The Senate leadership's decision to shelve a cap-and-trade bill will weaken the U.S. bargaining position in world climate diplomacy, says CFR's Michael Levi. See Gloom Awaits U.S. Climate Diplomacy http://www.cfr.org/publication/22689/gloom_awaits_us_climate_diplomacy.html

Nuking Westphalia: Obama’s Deep Convictions Point to War With Iran by Walter Russell Mead

Romania 'counting on' Areva for nuclear power plant: report

Romania is counting on expertise from French nuclear group Areva to plan construction of its new nuclear power
station, Economy Minister Adriean Videanu told the Adevarul daily on Thursday.

"We should quickly take a decision about the second nuclear power station. That's why we're counting on the expertise of French specialists (from Areva) about the choice of a site," Videanu told the paper.

U.S. anti-drone weapon unveiled

U.S. defense giant Raytheon Missile Systems has unveiled a laser weapon capable of shooting unmanned aerial vehicles from a range of just less than 2 miles.

Mounted on a U.S. warship's missile defense system, the laser shot down four drones in secret tests off California in May, Raytheon touted in a statement this week.

The test entailed tracking the drones with sensors used as part of a Raytheon-built ship defense system and destroying the aircraft using a high-powered, fiber-optic laser.

The laser's 50-kilowatt beam can shoot down a drone traveling as fast as 311 miles per hour.

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