Getty Images Gregory B. Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, left, and Peter Lyons, an acting assistant energy secretary, testifying on Wednesday.
A Senate subcommittee pressed federal officials on Wednesday on the safety of long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel in pools, a common practice at nuclear reactors in the United States and at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.
While some of the roughly 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from American plants is now stored in concrete and steel containers called dry casks, the majority of aging fuel is still kept in pools, often for decades.
Gregory B. Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, testified at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Water Subcommittee that two of six storage pools at the Fukushima plant in Japan experienced “challenges” after the tsunami knocked out power there this month and that it was “possible there was a leak” from at least one storage pool.
“Right now we don’t know for sure what the situation is,” Mr. Jaczko said. Two weeks ago the commission chairman testified before a House panel that water from one of the plant’s cooling pools had mostly or completely boiled off, posing the threat of a much wider release of radioactive materials.
The Japanese have been pumping enormous amounts of water into the reactors, a “feed and bleed” method of cooling them to prevent a full meltdown that has resulted in the release of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and leaks of contaminated water.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the subcommittee chairwoman, said that the failures in Japan suggested that the United States needed to reconsider its own storage methods for spent fuel.
As I wrote in Thursday’s Times, the fate of several multibillion-dollar solar thermal power plants to be built the Southern California desert is in question as conservationists and other groups sue to stop the projects largely on environmental grounds.
The legal tussle over putting large solar power plants in often-fragile desert landscapes underscores the difficulty of pushing forward projects crucial to fighting climate change and meeting California’s ambitious renewable energy mandates.
The five lawsuits currently pending against five solar thermal projects licensed by the state and approved for construction on federal land represent a multiplicity of interests.
The Sierra Club, for instance, has petitioned the California Supreme Court to overturn a license issued for the Calico Solar Energy Project, which the environmental group argues would harm the imperiled desert tortoise and other wildlife. A labor group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, also filed a petition on similar grounds. Read more…
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Environmental groups are worried that a massive solar project in the Mojave will threaten protected wildlife, like this fringe-toed lizard.
Tessera Solar plans to plant 34,000 solar dishes — each one 40 feet high and 38 feet wide — on 8,230 acres of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.
Although the lengthy licensing process for the Calico solar farm remains in the early stages, several environmental groups are already raising red flags about the massive project’s impact on such protected wildlife as the desert tortoise, the Mojave fringe-toed lizard and Nelson’s bighorn sheep.
Calico is one of dozens of industrial-scale solar farms planned for the Southwest that have divided environmentalists over the need to promote renewable energy while protecting fragile desert ecosystems.
But the sheer size of the Calico project, as well as its location next to federal conservation areas, is drawing scrutiny from grassroots green activists and national organizations like the Defenders of Wildlife.
The solar farm would generate 850 megawatts of electricity for Southern California Edison.
Also jumping into the fray is a well-funded labor group that is pressing solar developers to employ union workers, and the Wildlands Conservancy, a Southern California non-profit that supports a proposal by Senator Dianne Feinstein, D