SRS Watch news – July 1, 2015 – linked here
DOE Document Confirms that German Spent Fuel Planned to be Imported to SRS Poses No Nuclear Proliferation Risk in Germany; Document Obtained Via FOIA Deals Another Blow to Misguided Nuclear Waste Dumping Proposal
photos: AVR reactor with Greenpeace Germany projection on it, CASTOR storage cask and spent fuel balls, and various demonstrations at Juelich and in Bonn
Secret DOE Memo Linked Here
Columbia, SC – A key U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) memo kept secret from the public for almost two years affirms that highly radioactive spent fuel proposed to be imported from Germany to the Savannah River Site (SRS) “is not of a proliferation concern.” The memo contradicts unsubstantiated DOE claims to the public over the past year that the material posed a nuclear proliferation risk in Germany and must be brought to SRS for “disposal.”
The August 1, 2013 memo entitled “Proliferation Attractiveness of Juelich Graphite Spheres” was obtained by the public Interest group Savannah River Site Watch (SRS Watch) under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated October 13, 2013. That it took DOE over a year and a half to provide the documents reveals that DOE’s FOIA response is poor and needs great improvement.
The memo concludes that “the material is not attractive to sub-state/terrorist entities in its current state.” This admission may well confirm, as SRS Watch has claimed, that the real proliferation risk with the proposal is the current development of a technically sophisticated reprocessing technique by Savannah River National Lab (SRNL) to remove uranium from the graphite fuel.
full news release linked here – with various links to documents
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DOE/NNSA news release, June 25, 2015
“Energy Department Announces New Red Team to Review Plutonium Disposition”
How many times over how many years can plutonium disposition be studied? The program is 20 years old and the prognosis for MOX gets worse and worse. Will yet more delay by Senator Graham save the day? I’m afraid that this Red Team report could be a whitewash but I bet it won’t fully answer a key question: how can a program getting $345 million/year but needing $1 billion/year over the next 2+ decades survive?
Press Release
News Media Contact: (202) 586-4940
For Immediate Release: Thursday, June 25, 2015
Energy Department Announces New Red Team to Review Plutonium Disposition
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the creation of the Plutonium Disposition Program Red Team to review plutonium disposition options and make recommendations.
Led by Dr. Thom Mason, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this team will provide an assessment of options to help the U.S. achieve its commitment to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium and provide a recommended path forward.
The assessment will address the MOX fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches that the team deems feasible and cost effective, taking into account cost, regulatory or other issues associated with a particular approach. The Red Team will provide its recommendations to the Secretary of Energy in August 2015.
Dr. Mason led a similar effort reviewing options to replace uranium capabilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2014.