A citizens group heard this week that the Department of Energy plans to release by year’s end Orano’s plan for removing spent nuclear fuel from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vernon, Vt.
The company has been decommissioning Vermont Yankee in earnest since 2019, four years after its shutdown. In slides briefed Monday to the Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, A DOE official told locals that Orano submitted a draft site-specific inventory report to the agency in July. The U.S. currently has no permanent or interim repositories for spent fuel.
A senior DOE official in April said a federal interim storage facility might be built in 10 or 15 years, if Congress changes the law.
Seawater around the shuttered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, off the eastern coast of the Japanese main island of Kyushu, contained fewer than 10 becquerels of tritium per liter, according to a report, published by the Japan Nuclear Regulation Authority, of samples collected by plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in September.
The latest report included samples collected as recently as Sept. 23. The English-language Japanese public television station, NHK World, reported that this was below the country’s minimum detectable limit of tritium. TEPCO began discharging irradiated wastewater generated by cleanup of the plant’s three melted-down reactors on Aug. 24, Japanese media have reported. The reactors melted down in 2011 after a tsunami caused by an offshore earthquake.
Amid continuing congressional brinkmanship over federal spending that had the federal government close to a shutdown, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) proposed amending the House’s 2024 budget bill for the Department of Energy to drop Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s salary to $1 a year.
Norman, who during the current budget debate has opposed stopgap bills that would keep the government open temporarily, made headlines after the most recent U.S. presidential election for asking then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to urge then-President Donald Trump (R) to invoke “Marshall Law!!” three days before Joe Biden (D) was sworn in as President.
Co-sponsoring the amendment is Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), who has called for an impeachment inquiry into Granholm. Tenney said Granholm lied under oath in April, when the secretary of energy told Congress that she owned no individual stocks. Later, in June, Granholm said that she did own individual shares but that a government ethicist determined the ownership did not conflict with her official duties at DOE. Granholm said she has since sold those shares.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California’s first and longest-serving woman Senator, who wielded great influence over the federal government’s nuclear weapons, waste and energy programs as the leader of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, died Thursday in Washington at age 90, according to a statement from her chief of staff posted online just before 10 a.m. Eastern time Friday. The statement followed reports by multiple media outlets.
Even as Feinstein’s health declined during her final term in the Senate, she and her office exerted power over agencies including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, now chaired by Christopher Hanson, a former professional staffer on the appropriations committee she led. Hanson is a religious-studies major with a masters in environmental management and natural resource economics who in a decade of federal service worked his way to the NRC from the Senate and the Department of Energy.
Feinstein also supported the creation of a separate federal Nuclear Waste Agency, cosponsoring the legislation to do it in multiple sessions of congress. The bill faced opposition from the Nuclear Energy Institute, Feinstein said. “NEI opposes it, believe it or not,” Feinstein told reporters in 2017 after an appropriations hearing. “I couldn’t believe we couldn’t move this bill. Where’s the opposition coming from? It’s coming from the nuclear industry.”
