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Galena to apply for permit to build nuclear power plant - NO CHARGE: Toshiba to build plant for free; city to fund operation.
The Associated Press (Published: December 28, 2004)This is Just a Test by Eric Mack, Pacific News Service. Posted March 26, 2004
Village invited to test cheap, clean nuclear power -GALENA: Small reactor promises much, but it's never been built.
By JOEL GAY Anchorage Daily News October 21st, 2003Galena's nuke: a gift horse? by Douglas Yates
Nuclear power is the problem, not a solution by Helen Caldicott
Atomic Insights : Nuclear Power for Galena, Alaska Very detailed article from pro-nuclear power website
Treehugger: Pro and Con Blogger conversation on the subject (excerpt: "Nukes in Space! Nukes in Soup! Remember No Nukes? Now it's Green Nukes... Nukes are good for you! One dust particle of plutonium in your lungs and you're toast... "
Galena to apply for permit to build nuclear power plant
NO CHARGE: Toshiba to build plant for free; city to fund operation.The Associated Press
(Published: December 28, 2004)
Galena city officials have approved plans to build a 10-megawatt
nuclear power plant there as a test case for providing cheap power to
rural communities.City representatives and Toshiba Corp. officials will draft an
application for a license from federal regulators for the small-scale
reactor near the Yukon River community. The process could take
several years.The reactor unit would be 50 to 60 feet tall and 6 to 8 feet in
diameter. It would be built outside of Alaska and be encased in
several tons of concrete not to be opened during its operating life,
estimated at 30 years.The plant, called a battery, would be able to supply the community's
electricity for about a quarter of the cost of diesel fuel, according
to a U.S. Department of Energy study.The 4S reactor unit is referred to as a battery because it does not
have moving parts. Once installed, its fuel will not need to be
replaced as in conventional nuclear reactors.The Galena City Council directed City Manager Marvin Yoder to
"establish a process and timeline leading to evaluations, industrial
partners and financial and contractual arrangements necessary to
bring the economic and environmental benefits of the 4S to Galena."The council's resolution directed Yoder to work with the community's
Washington, D.C.-based attorney and Toshiba in developing the
application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.Licensing will be an involved process that will take several years
and substantial funding from Toshiba, Yoder said.Toshiba has offered to install the reactor at Galena free, if the
licensing is approved, as a commercial demonstration of the battery
in a remote location.If the technology is approved for use in the United States, Toshiba
believes there will be opportunities for sales worldwide and
elsewhere in rural Alaska, according to Robert Chaney, a researcher
with Science Applications International Corp.SAIC coordinated the Department of Energy study of long-term energy
supply options for Galena, including the Toshiba battery.Chaney said the energy department study weighed nuclear power against
other ways of providing Galena with improved energy, including more
efficient diesel generation, a small coal-fired power plant, and
wind, solar and hydropower from the nearby Yukon River.Wind, solar and hydropower were determined not to be practical
options for Galena, Chaney told an Alaska Miners Association group in
a Dec. 17 briefing on the project.If the nuclear battery went into operation in 2010, by 2020 it could
supply electricity to Galena for 5 to 14 cents a kilowatt hour,
assuming the community pays only the operating costs, the analysis
showed.Galena's power now costs 28 cents per kilowatt hour.
The cost could vary depending on the level of security federal
regulators require at the site, Chaney said.The plant would supply far more electricity than Galena now uses but
could enable local residents to convert their home heating fuel from
expensive oil to more affordable electricity and to operate
greenhouses and grow produce year-round, Chaney said.The risks include the use of liquid sodium as a heat transfer medium
and the long-term disposal of the radioactive waste, according to Ron
Johnson, a professor of engineering at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks, who is working with engineering aspects of the DOE study.Johnson said small nuclear plants may not be the answer for rural
power, regardless of the fate of the Galena experiment."If the technology is successfully deployed in Galena, its economic
viability in other Alaska villages and elsewhere depends on the
actual life cycle costs, which are yet to be quantified," he said.Alaska miners are interested in the Galena project because if the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves Toshiba's proposal, larger
nuclear batteries could provide power to remote mines.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/18254/(story March 26, 2004)
This is Just a Test
By Eric Mack, Pacific News Service. Posted March 26, 2004.Dangling the carrot of cheap energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is hoping to use a small native fishing village in Alaska as a guinea pig for its new 'micronuclear' power plants.
GALENA, Alaska--The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't issued a permit for a new commercial nuclear power plant in the United States since the late 1980s, when the technology topped the list of energy industry taboos following the infamous meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in the U.S.S.R. But if Japan's Toshiba Corp. has its way, the prototype for a new generation of "micronuclear" power plants will be constructed on a remote stretch of the Yukon River in Alaska before the end of the decade.
Last summer, representatives from Toshiba made the journey from Tokyo to Galena, a predominately Alaska Native village with a population of about 700. They met with community leaders to present their "4S" system, which stands for Super-Safe, Small and Simple.
According to Toshiba, the 4S could cut electricity costs for the village by more than 75 percent for at least 30 years. The plant would also use water from the Yukon River to create hydrogen gas to be stored in fuel cells, one of the most talked-about forms of renewable energy in recent years.
Galena serves as a hub for a handful of smaller villages along the Yukon and its tributaries. The region is made up of thousands of square miles of largely untouched boreal forest encompassing three National Wildlife Refuges, and includes some of the world's most renowned moose habitat. Like most communities in Western Alaska, Galena is a fly-in village; there are no highways, roads, or power lines linking it to the state's larger population centers. Large diesel generators must produce all electricity locally, using fuel delivered by a river barge during the summer months when the Yukon is ice-free.
The resulting electricity costs for local residents per kilowatt-hour is nearly three times the national average, even with assistance from a state-funded subsidy program.
Toshiba has pledged that the 4S prototype would be constructed at no cost to the village. Galena would have a cheap, clean-burning solution to all its energy needs for three decades, in exchange for becoming an international nuclear guinea pig.
Community member Rand Rosecrans cautioned Toshiba representatives at the presentation that many residents would have strong opinions: "You say the word 'nuclear?' and lots of people are going to have an automatic negative reaction." So far, tribal and city leaders have expressed a cautious interest and desire to learn more about the idea.
"Like anything new, it's going to have to be studied pretty closely before we agree to bring it in," Louden Village Council Chief Peter Captain told the Anchorage Daily News.
In 2001, the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University released working papers that examined the 4S system and three other similar reactors. The report was co-authored by Neil Brown, a Nuclear Engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In a phone interview, Brown explained that besides being smaller than most reactors, the 4S is a liquid sodium-cooled reactor, not a water-cooled one.
According to Brown, there are 21 sodium-cooled reactors around the world -- including Japan's MONJU reactor, which Toshiba helped construct with three other companies in the 1985.
After construction delays, MONJU first went critical in 1994, but was shut down after an accidental sodium leak and fire occurred in late 1995 while operating on low power. No radiation leaked out, but community concerns have kept MONJU shut down.
"MONJU has definitely not been a success," says Paul Gunter, a reactor specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. Gunter said that experience with sodium-cooled reactors in the United States has not been much better. "The main concern (with this type of reactor) is that sodium and water have a tremendous explosive reaction. There was another near accident in Detroit at Fermi Unit One in 1966, resulting from loose parts."
But attorney Douglas Rosinski, of the Washington, D.C., firm Shaw Pittman, which represents Toshiba, says the 4S system is nothing like the infamous nuclear power plants of the past. He compares the 4S to a completely self-contained, automated "nuclear battery" with no moving parts. At the heart of the 4S system is a log-sized uranium core, which would generate power for 30 years before needing to be disposed of and replaced.
Brown said the reactor is similar to the first submarine reactors, and that Toshiba's design includes inherent safety characteristics, making it "a low-pressure, self-cooling reactor."
Toshiba hopes to have a 4S system operational by the end of the decade, but the cost of testing and licensing the prototype to the satisfaction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could keep it from getting off the ground. Which is why a rural Alaska Native village with remarkably high-energy costs was chosen as an ideal site for a prototype.
Rosinski and others seek to gather enough political support to secure significant funding for the project. Alaska's senior Senator, Republican Ted Stevens, the Senate pro tempore and chair of the powerful appropriations committee, has said that he supports Toshiba's proposal, but that it will have to first clear the hurdle of public opinion.
The Department of Energy plans to send staff to the region to evaluate energy production capabilities, including the 4S. They plan to complete a report by the summer.
Eric Mack is a freelance writer based in Galena, Alaska.
http://www.adn.com/front/story/4214182p-4226215c.html
Village invited to test cheap, clean nuclear power
GALENA: Small reactor promises much, but it's never been built.By JOEL GAY
Anchorage Daily NewsPublished: Tuesday, October 21st, 2003
Last Modified: Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003 at 12:48 AMA Japanese corporation wants to thrust the Interior community of
Galena into international limelight by donating a new, unconventional
electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon
River village pollution-free for 30 years.There's a catch, of course. It's a nuclear reactor.
Not a huge, Three Mile Island-type power plant but a new generation
of small nuclear reactor about the size of a big spruce tree.
Designers say the technology is safe, simple and cheap enough to
replace diesel-fired generators as the primary energy source for
villages across rural Alaska.Such a plant would also have enough excess power to create hydrogen
gas, proponents say. They envision Galena as a demonstration center
for the highly vaunted hydrogen economy, in which cars and trucks
could run on the clean-burning gas.Department of Energy officials say the new technology is promising
but enormous hurdles remain. A reactor of this type and size has
never been built anywhere in the world, much less tested and licensed
for use in the United States. The cost of building a prototype that
meets stringent U.S. safety standards could kill it, said a nuclear
engineer at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California.
Galena's nuke: a gift horse?
http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/native/business_finance/ pns_native_alaska_nukes.aspHere we have a Japanese corporation willing to install nuclear-powered
electricity in a remote Alaska village for testing. It's a turn-key
operation; they set up the unit and walk away, for 30 years. Is there
not just a touch of irony here? Is the reduced power incentive so
strong that it cancels the precautionary principle as well as the
wisdom the land provides?Doesn't this warrant a state-wide discussion? The downstream
consequences of a malfunction may affect people and land far from
Galena, pop. 700. Sadly, I suspect the NRC is likely to base a decision
on politics not science. Stevens has been quoted as saying he'd support
it if the people of Alaska approve.If this gets a green light, it's going to be a freeway to development.
Small nukes will be pitched as green: no more polluting, noisy and
costly diesel. They'll be designed for large mines, like Pebble, Pogo
and more still in exploration. Not to mention other villages vying to
have a nuke of their own.If PeaK Oil's curve holds, such small nukes will become increasingly
attractive. [See the citations for Galena's nuke on Google.] We'll ride
into the post-oil world on the backs of mini-nukes, with Alaska as the
proving ground for the rest of the country. If you don't like the color
of this horse, or its teeth, those among us with expertise and views
about the nuclear flirtation now apace in Galena are encouraged to
share them with a larger audience.
Douglas Yates
Nuclear power is the problem, not a solution
Helen Caldicott
13apr05
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12835747%5E12332,00.html
THERE is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify
nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.In fact Leslie Kemeny on these pages two weeks ago (HES, March 30)
suggested that courses on nuclear science and engineering be included in
tertiary level institutions in Australia.I agree. But I would suggest that all the relevant facts be taught to
students. Mandatory courses in medical schools should embrace the short
and long-term biological, genetic and medical dangers associated with
the nuclear fuel cycle. Business students should examine the true costs
associated with the production of nuclear power. Engineering students
should become familiar with the profound problems associated with the
storage of long-lived radioactive waste, the human fallibilities that
have created the most serious nuclear accidents in history and the
ongoing history of near-misses and near-meltdowns in the industry.At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world.
If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace
fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000
large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has
been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical.
Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all
fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only
be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to
four years.The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted
for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government.
The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in
the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry
pays only $US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is
covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all
the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These
costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive
waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the
economic assessments of nuclear electricity.It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very
different.In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including
Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the
electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit
large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent
of global warming.Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release
from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly
in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned
internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit
responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global
warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel
at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the
construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic
decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its
20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term
storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan
Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer
greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations.Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is
therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors
consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the
air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the
nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be
biologically inconsequential. This is not so.These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and
argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a
nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty
tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs,
near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit
high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm
and cause genetic disease.Tritium, another biologically significant gas, is also routinely emitted
from nuclear reactors. Tritium is composed of three atoms of hydrogen,
which combine with oxygen, forming radioactive water, which is absorbed
through the skin, lungs and digestive system. It is incorporated into
the DNA molecule, where it is mutagenic.The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at
the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever,
addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear
reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive
waste per year.Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in
cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting
transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous
material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it
travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25
years.But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a
problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km
northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste.
But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the
long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain
made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake
faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data
about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had
been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling
revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca
Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to
deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National
Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors,
which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained
in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists,
which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly
radiation -- significantly worse than the radiation released by
Chernobyl, according to some scientists.This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools
at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive
elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the
most important being cancer and genetic diseases.The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to
radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and
immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the
malignant effects of radiation than other people.I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear
power plants.Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in
Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is
radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy
vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the
lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later
induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their
thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded
in pediatric literature.Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates
in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during
lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone
cancer and leukemia.Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food
chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in
muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so
toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is
made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is
handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver,
where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone
cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It
also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can
cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for
the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic
diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years,
living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of
plants, animals and humans.Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons -- only 5kg is necessary
to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year.
Therefore any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically
manufacture 40 bombs a year.Because nuclear power leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations,
because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more
expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it
can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons, these topics need urgently
to be introduced into the tertiary educational system of Australia,
which is host to 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the world's richest
uranium.Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and president
of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the danger of
nuclear energy.
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