The Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News 08FEB2012

Talk spotlights impact crater
Wetumpka Herald
He discussed the circumstances that caused the crater, the likely origin of the meteor, past and current research and future plans. King began actively researching the site in 1998, and his efforts confirmed that the approximately 4-mile-wide ridge of ...

Rare Martian meteorite given to science
BBC News
A Martian meteorite - an incredibly rare

Got Nuclear Waste? We’ll Take It!

Over the past few weeks, the people of Carlsbad, N.M., have been busy making one thing known: they want the United States’ nuclear waste and they want it bad.

Their support is being driven by recommendations released last week from the Obama administration’s blue ribbon commission on how to fix the nation’s nuclear waste management program. Most noteworthy for the people of Carlsbad is the recommendation by the commission that the United States pursue a “consent-based approach,” where local communities are engaged in the project from the beginning so that they avoid a situation where politics later trump progress on a much-needed repository (*cough* Yucca Mountain *cough*). My colleague Mark Flanagan explained this approach and the reasoning behind it on the blog last week.

Carlsbad is unique from any other area of the country because it is home to salt beds, an ideal burial place for transuranic waste because of its self-sealing qualities, which is why the U.S. Department of Energy built its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) there in the 1980s, a project that has garnered a lot of community support. Here’s what a DOE fact sheet has to say about the geologic conditions at the site:

Bedded salt is free of fresh flowing water, easily mined, impermeable and geologically stable—an ideal medium for permanently isolating long-lived radioactive wastes from the environment.

Throughout the 1960s, government scientists searched for an appropriate site for radioactive waste disposal, eventually testing a remote desert area of southeastern New Mexico where, 250 million years earlier, evaporation cycles of the ancient Permian Sea had created a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed.

Because of its unique geologic qualities and growing community support, Carlsbad and Eddy County officials this past Saturday joined together in offering New Mexico’s salt beds as a final destination for U.S. high-level radioactive waste.

"Eddy County has proven that involving local governments and citizens in the planning and oversight process leads to a successful mission. Community support and involvement in every step of the process, especially emergency services and transportation, is absolutely essential." said Roxanne Lara, Eddy County Commissioner and Energy Communities Alliance Secretary. "The BRC recognized the importance of this model. The bottom line is that Southeast New Mexico has the knowledge, the location and the desire to be a solution to this nation's nuclear waste problem. Let's get moving."

The blue ribbon commission, although not tasked with the responsibility of picking a site to hold the nation’s nuclear waste, echoed some of the positive aspects of the Carlsbad site in their report:

The crucial difference in the WIPP case [from Yucca Mountain] was the presence—also from the outset—of a supportive host community and of a state government that was willing to remain engaged. Starting in the early 1970s and continuing to the present, elected officials and other local leaders in and around the WIPP site, particularly in the Carlsbad business community, made it very clear that they approved of the development and use of the facility to dispose of defense TRU wastes. This unwavering local support helped to sustain the project during periods when federal and state agencies had to work through disagreements over issues such as the nature of the wastes to be disposed, the role of different entities in providing oversight, and the standards that the facility would be required to meet.

(They also provided an overview of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on page 21.)

Not only does the Carlsbad community have the know-how and the right environment to support a nuclear waste repository, but they also view it as a way to boost the local economy, which is a major contributing factor to their overall support. A recent Forbes piece captures it perfectly:

This attitude—“Yes in my backyard,” if you will—has brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine. Unemployment sits at 3.8%, versus 6.5% statewide and 8.5% nationally. And thanks to this project—euphemistically known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP—New Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad.

Before WIPP the area’s economy was mostly limited to potash mining, oil and gas drilling, and a passel of tourists stopping on the way to ­Carlsbad Caverns, an hour south. The Department of Energy’s $6 billion program created 1,300 permanent jobs, many of them high-paid engineering positions. Energy’s annual budget for WIPP is $215 million, much of which stays in the community as wages.

The surrounding communities are not only supportive about accepting the nation’s nuclear waste, Forbes said they have “doubled down” on the opportunity:

The leaders of neighboring Lea and Eddy counties have doubled down on the nuke biz, establishing a 1,000-acre atomic industrial park. ­Already uranium fuel maker Uren­co Group has built a $3 billion fabrication plant there, employing 300.

Now they’re seeking to build a surface-level facility to store used nuclear fuel rods in 100-ton, 15-foot-tall steel-and-concrete casks.

Given that the community and local leaders support developing a nuclear waste repository, what’s the hold up? Forbes explains:

Even if the money’s there, and the will, there’s still a lingering question of how the salt would react when in contact with canisters of high-level waste, 600 degrees hot.

Trapped within the salt are microscopic pockets of 250-million-year-old seawater. Because heat increases the solubility of salt in water, the more heat, the more salt dissolved. One theory suggests that high heat will attract nearby water toward the waste canisters, potentially corroding them. Ned Elkins, Los Alamos lab’s chief salt repository scientist, who works at WIPP, says all current modeling indicates that neither the heat nor water should pose any significant problems, “but we have to let the science speak for itself, to erase all doubt.” The DOE has begun a $40 million study to prove it out, but conclusive results will take at least three years.

Letting science dictate policy sounds like a good idea to me, so I guess it’s a wait and see game to determine if the site is technically qualified. Either way, it is encouraging to see that there are American communities out there that are willing to accept the nation’s nuclear waste and stand determined to make their case known.

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(For an interesting read, check out Spiegel Online to see how Sweden was able to build community support for its permanent nuclear waste repository and actually had to choose between two willing host communities. The blue ribbon commission visited Sweden during the course of its two-year evaluation and believes it to be a good example for how a country can sustain public trust and confidence to see a facility through to completion.)

Photo: Photograph taken by Chip Simons and featured in Forbes’ “Nuke Us!”

On the Temperature Increase at Fukushima Daiichi Unit #2

Over the past 24 hours we've seen a number of account concerning rising temperatures inside reactor #2 at Fukushima Daiichi. While we noted this item over at SafetyFirst.nei.org yesterday morning, some accounts of the news have been rather breathless.

If you'd like a sober account of what's actually happening there right now, I'd suggest reading the following account from World Nuclear News. Here's the relevant passage:

This stability of unit 2 was disturbed for a few days, however, when Tepco tried to improve cooling further by tuning the rates of water injection.

[...]

After making this change, Tepco noted a tendency for increasing temperature at the bottom of the reactor vessel. Within a matter of hours the company decided to reverse the change and restore the previous injection rates, but the temperature continued to slowly rise.

Two of the three temperature sensors at the bottom of the reactor vessel edged up by about 2 degrees C. The third, however, rose by around 20 degrees C to hit 72.2 degrees at 5.00am today. Tepco acted to stem this increase by injecting an extra cubic metre of water per hour through the feedwater line, and this stabilised the sensor at about 70 degrees C. It has since decreased to 68.5 degrees C, while the other two sensors were at a new low of around 41 degrees C.

Tepco was able to discount recriticality as a potential cause of the temperature rise after conducting an analysis of charcoal filters in the containment gas control system. These showed very low traces of fission products that were below the threshold that would indicate criticality. Nevertheless Tepco this morning injected boric acid into the reactor vessel as a precaution and increased the core spray injection rate by three cubic metres per hour.

The bottom line here: at no time did the temperature of the bottom of the reactor vessel exceed, or even approach, 100 degrees C, which was one of the important conditions TEPCO has to maintain for cold shutdown conditions.

We're keeping an eye on this and will report back if events warrant.

NBC Los Angeles Gets it Right on San Onofre

Over the past few days we've seen a raft of coverage about the incident at San Onofre last week, but little of it has put the events there in the proper context. The one exception to the rule is this report by Vikki Vargas of the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles:

View more videos at: http://nbclosangeles.com.

More later.

The Latest Worldwide Meteor/Meteorite News 07FEB2012

Texas Meteor/Fireball/Space Junk (UFO?) Feb. 1, 2012 - Scanner ...
A Sheilaaliens exclusive... lol.... ^.~ also check out http://lunarmeteoritehunters. blogspot.com ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdlRBFX2fa8

Meteor graces the region's sky | Richmond Times-Dispatch
A beautiful meteor streaked across the central Virginia sky Friday night.It was a bright kind called a "fireball."
www2.

When 51 Percent Say Yes

From the department of unlikely mind changes, India division:

An anti-nuclear forum spearheading the stir against Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant today said they would withdraw their protest if most locals favored the project and demanded that the state government constituted panel visit all villages and towns affected by KNPP.

NEI will close its doors as soon as a majority of Americans decide nuclear energy is not for them. The President will resign his position if his approval rating slips below 50 percent. My chance of surviving this disease is slightly less that 50/50. Time to reach for the bottle.

Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. But it’s called the  People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy for a reason. So even if what it will win will be a pyrrhic victory, with the taste of ashes on its tongue, I hope it doesn’t quit on the prospect of 51 percent going against its views. We wouldn’t. But it can make you think.

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So shrill you almost have to be a dog to hear it:

With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) believed to be within days of announcing the final federal approval of the controversial Vogtle nuclear project, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) has asked a court to stop more than two years of stonewalling by Southern Co. and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which are resisting any meaningful public disclosure to taxpayers of the risks to which they are exposed in the massive commitment of $8.33 billion in conditional federal loan guarantees to Southern Company and their utility partners for two proposed new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia.

But really, they had me at controversial. How many more paragraphs does SACE have to go before Solyndra hits the mix? You guessed it: one. And SACE probably liked Solyndra.

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China will slow approvals of nuclear projects after the resumption, which is expected to take place this year, according to an industry expert from a national energy think tank.

Okay, I guess that makes sense.

"China will be cautious in pursuing nuclear power and is likely to approve only three or four projects each year,…" said Xiao Xinjian, a nuclear industry expert at the national Energy Research Institute, affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission.

Oh. Wait, what?

The country had been accelerating its nuclear development since 2008, with 14 reactors approved in 2008 and six in 2009.

So there you are. It’s all relative. Wonder how SACE would take it.

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It can’t all be good news and snark, can it?

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha recently announced that the government will postpone the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Shkoder region until issues regarding its potential impact on the environment and territory are fully resolved, AENews reported.

Albania is hesitating because the Shkoder region is seismically active. There may be surprises in the Japan lesson learned reports,  but the accident there appears to have had the tsunami as its main cause, not the earthquake.

Regardless, if Albania chooses to proceed, and it would be smart to do so, it will be with enhanced safety in mind, and that’s never a bad thing. We expect at least 51 percent would agree.

Koodankulam nuclear facility.

Breaking News - Ontario / MI / NY / PA / OH / IN Meteor Fireball 6FEB2012

Breaking News - Ontario, Canada / MI / NY / PA / OH / IN, USA Meteor Fireball~6:40 AM EST 6FEB2012


ONT, Canada / MI, NY PA Meteor Fireball 06FEB2012
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