Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
The nation's oldest nuclear power facility begins shutdown procedures.
Yankee Row once leading the nation's nuclear power reactors with a safety record now
must lead the way again, writing the book on how to destroy a nuclear power plant.
Also this time, American and Russian scientists.
Recently some American scientists have begun grumbling about a brain drain from the former
Soviet Union.
One team though has been working together quite well and has developed technology to recycle
petroleum waste into usable products.
And Anne McKay, in Albuquerque, tells why the use of lawn pesticides is such a hotly
contested issue.
If I go out in my own yard, I'm subject to the chemicals that they spray in my neighbor's
yard.
And I don't think that's fair.
The Environment Show is a national production made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New
York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
The decision by its owners to close the Yankee Row atomic power station will not mean the
end of worries and troubles for the facility.
In fact, the next chapter is likely to bring challenges for which there are as yet no
procedures.
Not only must the fuel be disposed, everything must go.
The reactor vessel, the pipes and valves, the concrete, even the parking signs, typewriters
and light bulbs.
Though plant spokesman Bill McGee says it is way too early to pick dates or even predict
the final cost of decommissioning.
Our intent is to return the row site to a green field state as soon as we possibly can.
Now that could be anywhere from five to ten years from now.
We don't know that.
What has to happen is to come up with a decommissioning plan which will be a detailed engineering document
that will also have the financials in there.
It will just everything.
What has to be dismantled?
How we're going to dismantle it?
Where the stuff's going to go?
What our radiation protection program is?
What our radiation monitoring program is going to be?
How we're going to ensure that nobody who works on the project or no one who lives near
the plant is adversely affected by this?
All of this has to go into a comprehensive, complete plan that is going to take us at
least a year to develop.
And we envision submitting this to the federal government sometime towards the end of 1993.
McGee says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must then approve the plans.
The plan was constructed in 1958 as a demonstration project to see how the technology would work.
For over 30 years, the plant maintained a number one safety record being online and available
78.3% of the time.
This was compared to all others which have been available an average of 70.4% of the time.
Now, as it lived, so it shall die.
In other words, just like Yankee has for 32 years run a model program for the industry,
now we're going to run a Model D commissioning program for the industry to ensure no harm comes to any of the Yankee employees
and also no possible harm comes to the public.
That's a sacred trust that we've got.
We've done a very well for 32 years and no reason to believe we're just going to walk away from this.
We're not going to do that.
We are dedicated people who work hard and have their families living in that area as well.
The oldest plant in the nation, Yankee Row, in North Central Massachusetts was first in line to need to begin
re-licensing procedures.
However, last summer, concerns about the safety of the old reactor vessel thought perhaps to have gotten brittle over the years
caused the NRC to investigate.
In September, the Federal Agency ordered the 185 megawatt facility shut down for safety tests and repairs,
estimated to cost $23 million.
But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not order the plant permanently closed then.
In fact, says Walter Butler, Director of the Yankee Review Project at the NRC in Maryland,
the commission was never involved in the decision to close recently.
I guess the reaction from the NRC is relatively neutral.
Other parties have expressed the view that this is a responsible decision.
We recognize that there is some measure of uncertainty that the licensee faces and they make economic decisions.
Based on their consideration, they decided that on the basis of economics, it was not prudent to proceed with the restart program.
However, Butler says the decision may have been a bit hasty.
The safety matter or the safety issue could have been resolved.
The licensee had a program defined to develop data with which to resolve the safety questions.
The licensee determined that the cost of completing that program was too expensive when considering the other economic parameters tied with Yankee Roe.
The existing recession has led to a reduced demand for electric power.
And as a result, the availability of low cost power in that region made it imprudent to proceed with the program for restarting the Yankee Roe facility.
Howard Reese, executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the organization that pressured the NRC over the years to close Yankee on safety grounds.
They seem to try to be separating out or put a public spin on this whole decision, which again was a wise one I think on their part that it was strictly for economic reasons and not for safety.
But the simple fact is, where the safety upgrades that were going to drive the economics, so in reality they have determined that it was too costly to try to upgrade the plant to make it safe.
Secondly, they have tried to blame their need to shut the plant down on some unpredictability in the regulatory system.
And in fact, there was great predictability and certainty in this case about what the regulatory system requires and demands of the plant operator.
There are specific numerical standards which were sent years ago, which governed the strength of the reactor vessel.
The utility knew what those standards were and apparently they lost confidence in their ability to meet them.
Whereas the decision to close the plant was swift and rather uncomplicated, actual dismantling will require procedures perfected only as they are being developed.
In fact, our failure to have a procedure in place is symbolic of a larger concern, namely our failure to plan ahead and take a product, a material or a method from cradle to grave.
Specifically, though there were 111 atomic stations running, we have had no place to get rid of the nuclear fuel waste.
Reese is not hopeful we will find a place anytime soon.
Unfortunately, the nationwide there is no plan in place for dealing with the long-term disposal of nuclear or high-level nuclear waste, particularly in this case we are talking about spent fuel from the Yankee-Roe reactor.
The federal government is working on a concept to store high-level waste as it is called underground under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
They have spent more than $500 million to date. There is great controversy about whether this site would be appropriate and safe.
At the earliest now, anyone thinks that that facility might be ready as 2010 and I suspect that is even optimistic.
So, barring the opening of that facility, there is essentially no place to take that spent fuel or waste away from the Yankee-Atomic plant.
So, I suspect what will happen is that that spent fuel will remain on site probably for another 20 years if not longer.
When decommissioning begins, it will be the first time a commercial reactor has been destroyed.
To learn how to do this, McGee says they will be studying specifically the decommissioning of the government facility in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, taken apart two years ago.
McGee expects a lot of attention.
We are eight years earlier than we thought we would be in this process.
For the next couple of weeks or months, we will be gathering data from other plants, other companies that have been involved in this contractors who have been involved robotics that have been used, procedures that have been used and see what is usable for us, what we are going to have to make that is unique to our situation, what we can do better than other cities on their lessons learned.
In the middle of this decade, Yankee is going to write the book on how to do decommissioning of a commercial nuclear power plant.
The industry will be watching us, I am sure, I know that the regulators will be watching us, there will be a lot of very valuable lessons learned for other plants that will have to go through a similar procedure after the turn of the century.
Contained in the recently passed Senate Energy Bill is a section to expedite nuclear plant licensing procedures, allowing more stations to come online faster.
As it is, nationally, nuclear power supplies 22% of our energy needs.
Parallel to the debate over how properly two dispose of Yankee Rome is won over the future of nuclear power in general.
Critics of the industry are tempted to see in the closing of Yankee the beginning of a trend away from nuclear power.
Philip Bain, cautions against jumping to conclusions, Bain is president of the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, the Nuclear Industries Trade Association.
In fact, Bain argues against dividing the argument into pro and con.
First of all, I would object to allowing people who are obstructing the ability to use nuclear power in this country to usurp the title of environmentalist because, as you know, nuclear power is an environmental-only, benign source of electricity.
And therefore, I consider myself an environmentalist. So, I just like to get that straight. I think that they would love to have this be a precedent-setting event, but it is not because Yankee Rome was one of the first plants built in the country.
And it was built to standards which have since changed.
Bain says newer plants have been built to even more exacting standards using not only the latest materials, but the latest technologies as well, technologies that enable the plants operators more easily and quickly to tell whether there are potential hazards developing.
Bain also downplays concerns surrounding the decommissioning process.
This industry, the nuclear industry is the most highly regulated industry in this country, other than maybe an airplane industry, but it is highly regulated.
And in order to operate a plant, you have to have a license, you have to have procedures, you have to have people there who can detect radiation and protect the workers from radiation.
Those same procedures that are used for an operating plant would be used for a decommission, a plant being decommissioned.
And one of the first steps in decommissioning a plant is to decontaminate the plant, which by that word means to use a chemical solution to clean up the material.
And by clean up I mean to take away radioactivity that is there clinging to the sides of the vessel and the piping and filter that out and then take that radioactivity away so that when the workers come in the work there are less radioactivity in a plant that's being decommissioned than there is in one that's operating.
Interestingly, powered Reese of the Union of Concerned Scientists concur's saying storage of the spent fuel at the plant site during decommissioning is not that much of a problem.
Nuclear waste is stored on all reactor sites around the country now. It is a lot less hazardous. We think then if the plant had been allowed to operate in its present condition.
Plant spokesman Bill McGee anticipates up to 150,000 cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste material will be collected from Yankee.
Of the $100 million expected to be spent on the decommissioning process he says 60 million is already in hand from a trust fund set up a long time ago just for this purpose.
And he says the destruction of Yankee row will be a model test case. One will be watching and reporting on from time to time. Stay tuned.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Some contend the chemical sprayed on neighborhood lawns and gardens may be making us sick.
Responding to a 1991 legal challenge the United States Supreme Court allowed local governments to pass their own pesticide use restrictions.
Now conservationists are waging a national campaign to support this action but chemical companies and applicators oppose local controls claiming it could lead to an array of confusing regulations. Kent Patterson reports from Albuquerque.
The Frontyard sprinkler is a common enough site but today's lawn care is a complicated business often requiring large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Yet the mounting use of home garden chemicals is blamed for toxic exposures to thousands of people like Linda McCay.
Standing outside her Albuquerque home, McCay points to a neighbor's yard where she says chemicals drifting from a lawn care companies application gave her a sore throat.
I made a complaint because it was windy that day and the wind was blowing towards my house.
So all the chemicals were blowing this direction.
After reporting the incident to the Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, McCay was assured the problem would not happen again.
Although McCay receives advanced notice of planned chemical applications, she's still not completely satisfied.
If I go out in my own yard, I'm subject to the chemicals that they spray in my neighbor's yard and I don't think that's fair.
In recent years, stories like Linda McCays have gained more attention. Every year Americans use about 70 million pounds of pesticides on lawns alone. This amount far surpasses pesticide usage on food crops.
With lawn care chemicals such as 2-4-D suspected of causing cancer, some local communities are taking action.
More than 50 municipalities nationwide have ordinances mandating advanced notification of planned treatments and or posting of sprayed premises.
J. Feldman, the coordinator of the Washington DC-based National Coalition against the misuse of pesticides or N-Camp, says these so-called local measures are necessary because state and federal enforcement agencies are not adequately addressing the issue.
There are numerous US general accounting office GAO reports that have berated EPA for its failure time and time again to adequately protect the public from pesticides.
Local governments play a vital role in this whole question of pesticides in our local communities.
It's simply not appropriate in this day and age to rely on the federal and state governments to protect our groundwater, to protect our air.
There's a vital role here that local governments can and should play as a Supreme Court affirmed back in June.
Typically, state departments of agriculture enforce the federal insecticide, fungicide, and rodenticide act, commonly known as fifra.
But N-Camp got a boost last year when the US Supreme Court upheld the right of localities to pass their own pesticide use ordinances.
Now members of the chemical, pest control, and agricultural industries are fighting back.
Charging that local pesticide rules will create a mishmash of confusing regulations they form the coalition for sensible pesticide policy.
Coalition spokesman Steve Russell agrees that concerns over pesticide use are valid, but he says regulation should remain in state and federal hands.
So our answer is if there is a problem with the application of pesticides or with a particular product, that product or that problem is probably not limited to one local area.
And if there is a problem let's get it addressed and it should be addressed on a statewide basis.
In recent months the battle over local pesticide control has flared in western states. Voters in Missoula, Montana rejected a referendum last November which would have instituted local control.
And in New Mexico, the state's Farm Bureau has joined forces with the New Mexico Department of Agriculture to prepare state legislation barring local ordinances.
But at the same time, N-Camp is spearheading a national campaign to defend the right of local pesticide control.
Kent Patterson reporting from Albuquerque for the High Plains News Service, a production of the western organization of resource councils in Billings, Montana.
In the early 1980s, Dr. John Harkness came across results from research conducted at the Karchakhov Institute of Atomic Energy in the then Soviet Union.
The Soviet research outlined an innovative way to convert a particular form of waste from petroleum refining into marketable products.
That waste is the poisonous gas hydrogen sulfide which the Soviet researchers had learned how to separate into usable sulfur and hydrogen.
Interestingly, at the same time, Harkness and his colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois were working on the same experiment.
For several years, Harkness tried to contact his counterparts in Russia, but it was not until the spring of 1990 that he finally received an answer.
July of 1990, I went to Damasco to see what they were doing in their laboratory and discovered that they had been working quite diligently on what had been a very small laboratory experiment reported in the literature.
Almost ten years earlier, and that they had made really remarkable advances and have some very high-powered equipment and high-powered personnel brought to bear on the research problem.
The visits resulted in a plan called the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements. The first agreement is expected to be in place by April and it will bring American scientists up to date on the discoveries in Moscow.
While the scientists used to be rivals, Harkness says neither group can afford to work without the other.
At the sample, they were so far ahead of us, we weren't going to gain anything by competing with them.
Especially since their program, I would say, is in danger of losing its funding from the Russian Republic.
So by working with them and helping to support their in-house research, we can get all the benefits of their ten years worth of research both in the laboratory and that industrial facilities.
One of the Russians' major advances is a high-powered microwave generator, which Harkness calls mind-boggling in size.
The microwaves are so strong, the scientists are able to collect pure hydrogen gas and sulfur while destroying poisonous hydrogen-sulfide gas.
Current American technology only retrieves sulfur.
Harkness describes the Russian process, which American scientists will implement in the second agreement.
The hydrogen-sulfide gas flows through basically just a large pipe and we pump in microwave energy.
Into that pipe, it actually ignites the gas so that it doesn't combust but it lights up just like a fluorescent light and glows really a very pretty blue.
Splits the hydrogen-sulfide into hydrogen and sulfur.
The cool stream down to collect the liquid sulfur and then the gases which are not liquefied would be separated to get a pure hydrogen product and any unconverted hydrogen-sulfide would then be recycled.
Go back to the beginning of the process to go through the plasma zone a second time.
Hydrogen is used to refine crude oil into gasoline and other petroleum products such as plastics.
Harkness says using this new process refiners may save money by using the recycled hydrogen rather than purchasing new raw material.
There are some byproducts from the process but Harkness calls them minor.
However, he hopes the life-sized Russian model will give scientists an idea of the effects these byproducts may have on a larger scale.
While he speaks the common languages of engineering and chemistry, Harkness says his struggle with the Russian language has caused some mishaps.
The scientists use fax machines to do most of their communicating.
The technical side of it is pretty straightforward. There have been a couple of amusing incidents learning how to count in Russian has provided more than one opt-general.
We keep repeating the numbers in English and Russian so we make sure that each of us has translated correctly.
Harkness says Glossnost has open communication between scientists in the two countries but so has the Russians growing need for funding.
As the former Soviet government wrestles with its economy many researchers particularly military scientists have been left behind.
Indeed, there is growing concern that some Russian scientists might be hired by American adversaries like Iraq to work on weapons development.
Harkness says the collaborative research at the Argonne National Laboratory jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Gas Research Institute is far removed from nuclear weapons development.
To prevent a Russian brain drain to potentially hostile nations many Americans now are trying to establish similar agreements with former Soviet scientists.
After August it was clear that they were going to be hard pressed to keep this research effort going and would need whatever outside support we could give them.
We have tried to speed up things here and to establish a whole range of research collaborations within the Russian scientific community.
My project is not the only one. There is at least one other here at Argonne that has substantial involvement in one or more research efforts in Moscow and one in Leningrad.
Dr. John Harkness, a chemical engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois.
This is Bruce Robertson. And that's our report this week. Our story on hydrogen retrieval was written and produced by Karen Kelly.
For a cassette copy of this program called 1-800-767-1929 this week asked for the Environment Show No. 114.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its contents. Dr. Alan Chartock, executive producer and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York.
