Safety Reviewers Raise Questions about Construction of New Nuclear Fuel Plant S.C.

[ensho]

http://www.propublica.org/article/safety-reviewers-raise-questions-about-construction-of-new-nuclear-fuel-pla



In the late 1990s, U.S. policymakers approved a plan to turn plutonium from nuclear weapons into fuel for commercial reactors. The first-of-its kind plant, now being built in South Carolina, was intended to reduce the Cold War stockpile and the threat of nuclear material theft while supplying the country’s energy needs.

More than a decade later, the mixed oxide fuel (MOX) plant is running into mounting troubles, including long delays, soaring costs and the lack of utilities committed to use the new fuel in their reactors.

But there’s another aspect of the story that has received little attention. Two of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safety reviewers for the project say the NRC has taken shortcuts on safety to avoid delaying the construction. Work on the facility was allowed to begin, they say, before some of the most essential questions were fully answered. They have been particularly concerned about the danger of chemical explosions, the adequacy of the ventilation and radioactive waste disposal systems and the way the plutonium will be tracked as it is processed.

-snip-

The MOX plant is the first new construction authorized by the NRC since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. It is located at the federal Savannah River Site, an old bomb-making complex near Aiken, S.C. Originally estimated at $1.4 billion, it is now expected to cost taxpayers nearly $5 billion. It won’t begin producing fuel until 2016 at the earliest, about a decade behind schedule.

-long snip of concerns end with this plea: “We need congressional hearings on this,”
-----------------------------

may this horror never get completed