The Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee (MRMTC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Pasquale "Patsy" Razzano as the alternate member for the great state of Ohio. Patsy, pictured right, is a Radiological Analyst Supervisor for the Ohio Emergency Management Agency where he has worked for nearly seven years. He holds a B.S. from The Ohio State University and has completed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Advanced Professional Series and Radiation Specialist courses. In his current role he acts as a liaison with federal state and county emergency response officials, responders, and nuclear facilities that impact Ohio. Welcome to the MRMTC, Patsy!

CSG-Midwest staffer Melissa Shahzadeh attended the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Virtual Open Pre-Submittal Meeting regarding Michigan's Palisades Nuclear Power Plant on February 6. This hearing was described as an “observation meeting” by the NRC facilitator, meaning that it was a meeting in which attendees had the opportunity to observe the NRC performing its regulatory function and discussing regulatory issues. In sum, the nearly 2-hour meeting largely focused on the adjustment to language within the Palisades documents and licenses that is necessary to change status from "decommissioning" to "operational." There was significant attention paid to the development of a Quality Assurance Program and how compliance will be achieved. The meeting ended with a public comment period during which local stakeholders voiced their support and/or opposition to the effort to restart operation at Palisades.

Melissa and the indefatigable MRMTC program manager Mitch Arvidson (CSG-Midwest) met with Melanie Snyder of the Western Interstate Energy Board (WIEB) on February 7 to discuss the possible future of the Community Readiness Assessment Framework for Transportation (CRAFT) tool developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) last year. In October 2023 Mitch and Melissa travelled to Indiana for a groundtruthing session regarding the application of the CRAFT tool and received positive feedback from the local first responders with whom they met. As such, CSG-Midwest and WIEB are discussing possible paths forward to ensure the longevity and wide application of the tool to stakeholders in the Midwest and West. 

Melissa and Mitch also attended the February 12 American Nuclear Society (ANS) webinar “Spending Time on Spent Nuclear Fuel with the Department of Energy (DOE).” Steve Nesbit, former president of ANS, moderated the conversation with Paul Murray, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition at DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE). The conversation covered topics including the consent-based siting program, the problem of building public trust, and the successes and failures along the road to building a final depository for nuclear waste. Paul Murray spoke fluently about the challenges his office faces and candidly about his frustration with the near century-long timeframe for the final disposition of the nation’s backlog of waste into a permanent depository. Similar topics were explored during the Consent-Based Siting Listening Session hosted by Vincent Ialenti (DOE) on February 15, during which 27 panellists from 17 different organizations spoke about lessons learned, personal experiences, and best practices that could inform the efforts made by the scientists and researchers working on the siting of a consolidated interim storage facility.

Finally, please note that upcoming Transportation Emergency Preparedness Program (TEPP) Full 2-Day Modular Emergency Response Radiological Transportation Training (MERRTT) classes as well as other classes are listed in the sidebar calendar of this newsletter. We would like to remind all interested members that funding is available to defray expenses associated with attendance at training classes such as those listed here. Please contact Melissa Shahzadeh (mshahzadeh@csg.org) if you should have questions about these or other training opportunities.

Who Wore It Better?

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." -- Mark Twain

We have a Throw Back Thursday (TBT) photo for this month’s Who Wore It Better e-newsletter segment, an insouciant study of panache made manifest in the niche world of radioactive materials transport. Whilst in Palo, IA touring the Duane Arnold Energy Center and surrounding rail tracks, Melissa Shahzadeh (CSG-Midwest), Ed Engle (Iowa Department of Transportation) and Miriam Juckett (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) competed for the High-Vis Safety Champion gold medal. Who do you think won?

Members of The National Transportation Stakeholders Forum (NTSF) Planning Committee met on February 7 and again on February 26. The meetings were a hale effort to finalize breakout sessions for the June 2024 meeting and identify staff coordinators for the breakout session speakers. Additionally, members discussed plenary session topics, and there was consensus that a talk from nuclear industry representatives about “the state of the industry” would be of interest to the attendees. An effort also will be made to secure a speaker who could discuss the state of the industry from the perspective of the new generation entering the workforce today.

The conversations subsequently sifted to discussion of possible locations for the 2025 meeting, which will be hosted by WIEB. Current options include cities in Idaho, California, Utah, and Nevada. Whilst Las Vegas, NV is one option, it was not clear to members on the NTSF Planning Committee whether various agencies limit travel for their employees to that city. If readers of this e-newsletter are aware that their agencies restrict travel to Las Vegas, please do contact Mitch or Melissa to inform them.

Finally, we at CSG-Midwest have received a number of recent inquiries about the status of registration for the NTSF meeting this June and can assure interested readers that registration is forthcoming. In the interim, please note that NTSF is scheduled for June 3 - June 6 in Denver, CO.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea... Floor

In 1976, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) formed a multinational and multidisciplinary research program for scientists investigating disposing high-level radioactive waste in deep-ocean sediments. They called this program the Seabed Working Group (SWG) and it included 200 researchers hailing from ten different countries. The principal instigator behind this group was one Charles D. Hollister (d. 1999), a senior scientist in marine geology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution specializing in the dynamics of sediment transport on the ocean floor. For ten years Hollister and the team of scientists conducted tests of the abyssal plains that lie in the middle of the larger oceanic tectonic plates. They determined that these vast mud flats, largely bereft of biological load and lacking mineral wealth, represent possibly the least productive and least valuable real estate anywhere on Earth.

The SWG collected core samples from various sites in the Northern Atlantic and Pacific that revealed millions of years of unremitting geological quiescence. When these samples were compared with thousands of others collected from midplate locations (in contrast to the terminus of plates, where they slide past, subduct under, or otherwise crash into adjacent tectonic plates) during the Ocean Drilling Program, a multinational effort to explore the composition and structure of the oceanic basins that ran from 1985 until 2004, the SWG found the abyssal clays from these midplate seabeds also had remained geologically inert for millions of years. The SWG offered an audacious suggestion: disposal of nuclear wastes in the sediment of the seabed might indeed be a promising solution to that intractable problem. An article co-written by Hollister entitled Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed appeared in the January 1998 edition of Scientific American.

“These neglected suboceanic formations might provide a permanent resting place for high-level radioactive wastes,” the article proclaims. “The clay-rich muds that would entomb the radioactive materials have intrinsically favorable characteristics: low permeability to water, a high adsorption capacity for these dangerous elements and a natural plasticity that enables the ooze to seal up any cracks or rifts that might develop around a waste container… No geological formations on land are known to offer all these favorable properties.” 

The muddy midplate clays have the consistency of peanut butter and are described as having the capacity to tenaciously sorb plutonium and many other radioactive elements. This effectively locks them in place even in the event of cask failure and prevents them from seeping into ocean waters. Laboratory experiments, according to the article, revealed that any transuranic elements that escaped from a failed cask buried in the clays would migrate only a few meters in 100,000 years. The conclusion they reached was thus: “surgically implanting” the casks 100 meters or more into the seafloor would ensure that radioactivity either decays or dissipates before it could possibly migrate to the surface. They stated that standard deep-sea drilling techniques from the late ‘90s were sufficient unto the job.

The SWG concluded that further research into the idea of subseabed disposal “should be conducted before any attempt is made to use seabed disposal for high-level waste and spent fuel.” This prudence was warranted, particularly given fierce opposition from environmental groups concerned about compromising the marine environment, as well as enduring unknowns such as whether heat emitted by fuel rods would affect the abyssal clay surrounding the burial sites. Unfortunately, additional research was not conducted despite a 1994 report by the National Academy of Science that identified subseabed disposal as “the leading alternative to mined geologic repositories.”  Funding was terminated in 1986, the U.S. focused exclusively on geological depositories, and legal impediments, predicated on decades-earlier international and local legislation, foiled efforts to continue the study of a possible suboceanic entombment of nuclear waste.

The '70s were an exciting time for the environmental movement, and 1972 was seminal year for ocean protection. The Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Waste and Other Matter, known colloquially as the London Dumping Convention, prohibited the dumping of high-level radioactive wastes (among other pollutants) in the waters of the ocean. Closer to home, the U.S passed the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA), also called the Ocean Dumping Act, which, like its London counterpart, prevented any dumping of materials into ocean waters that would adversely affect human, marine, and ecological health. The phrasing of these pieces of legislation, however, is crucial. They both prohibit dumping into “ocean waters.” Indeed, these efforts were largely driven by the dawning awareness that many countries spent previous decades using the ocean as a conveniently vast disposal basin. In 1972, neither the London Dumping Convention nor the MPRSA specifically contended with the subject of burial of wastes beneath the sea floor. It was not until 1996 that parties to the convention voted to classify the disposal of nuclear material below the seabed also as “ocean dumping,” at which point that field of scientific study became verboten. 

Hollister argued the absurdity of designating subseabed burial as “dumping,” suggesting that doing so makes about “as much sense as calling the burial of nuclear wastes in Yucca Mountain ‘roadside littering.’” And, indeed, all this begs the question posed by the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s Monaco Laboratory, C.L. Osterberg, in 1982: “should we preserve the ocean at the expense of the land – for surely the laws that protect the ocean leave no option but to use our limited land for toxic waste disposal?” Whilst Mr. Osterberg’s question seems predicated on a tenuous (and possibly untenable) dichotomy, perhaps a new form of the question might be phrased thusly: international laws aside, why abandon the subseabed as a possible location for a permanent geological depository when the subseabed is itself technically geological (i.e., of the Earth)? The answer might very well hinge on psychology, and it might too highlight DOE’s prescience in securing social scientists in their efforts to site our nation's future depository. NIMBY (not in my backyard) is localized on land, largely confined to one's backyard, and its fervency seems to diminish in accordance with the inverse square law: the farther from my home, the less I can be bothered to care. However, science tells us that humanity crawled out of the ocean in the deep primordial past, and thus perhaps the ocean will always exist in the shadows of prehistoric memory as essentially everyone’s backyard.

Nuclear News

Xcel Energy Proposes Extension to Prairie Island Nuclear Facility Operating Life

Minnesota’s StarTribune reported on February 1 that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity utility that serves 1.3 million Minnesotans, announced an energy blueprint that includes extending the life of the Prairie Island Nuclear Facility by 20 years. The long-term energy blueprint represents a diversified approach to energy generation for the utility. In addition to extending the operations of the nuclear facility, the company is also exploring the construction of two large natural gas plants, large-scale battery storage, and investment in wind and solar farms. According to the StarTribune, "The proposal comes at a pivotal moment in the energy transition for Xcel, which has begun retiring its coal fleet and will shutter its last unit by 2030, pushing the company to replace that steady power generation with renewables and keep its three nuclear units running.” Ryan Long, President of Xcel’s Minnesota operations, said the diversified approach to carbon-free electricity should allow the company to exceed 80% carbon reduction by 2030. MPR News reports that the company is already seeking an extension to the operating license for the Monticello nuclear plant, about 40 miles Northwest of the Twin Cities, which is due to expire in 2030. That plant was temporarily shut down in March 2023 to repair a broken pipe that leaked water containing tritium. Xcel and Minnesota health officials have said there is no health risk associated with that leak.

Holtec Optimistic About DOE $1.5 Billion Grant for Palisades

Neutron Bytes reported on February 2 that a Holtec spokesperson told the Bloomberg Wire Service that the company is “very optimistic” that the DOE will approve a $1.5 billion loan that will be used to cover the costs attendant to restarting Michigan’s shuttered Palisades nuclear power plant. Holtec indicated that the reactor could be returned to “revenue service” by 2025 if the funds and the NRC license are in hand relatively soon. The article opines that this may be overly ambitious, stating “First, [Holtec] must address a multitude of technical issues to get the plant into a state of operational readiness. The plant needs extensive renovations and has a backlog of deferred maintenance that accumulated once it [sic] closure was announced several years ago. Second, it must convince the NRC that the plant can be operated safely. Given that the agency has never faced the challenge of relicensing a closed plant, it is likely to resist Holtec’s desire for progress at warp speed.” In addition to restarting Palisades, Holtec has plans to build two small modular reactors (SMRs) on site, for which it has already been in pre-licensing meetings with the NRC.

DOE Office of Emergency Management (DOE-EM) Announces Priorities for 2024

The DOE-EM released its program priorities to drive cleanup efforts in the coming calendar year. These priorities cover key cleanup actions, project construction, acquisition and other activities that will further DOE-EM's environmental mission: "To complete the safe cleanup of the environmental legacy brought about from decades of nuclear weapons development and government-sponsored nuclear energy research." The five priorities are:

1. Achieve Significant Construction Milestones
2. Execute Key Cleanup Projects
3. Reduce the EM Footprint
4. Award Contracts that Enable Accelerated Progress
5. Drive Innovation and Improve Performance

According to William White, DOE-EM Senior Advisor, "these critical priorities set the stage for a new chapter in cleanup in communities that supported our nation for so many years and represent EM's commitment to doing the right thing for those most impacted by the environmental legacy of the past." A full description of the priorities and the announcement itself can be found on the DOE's website here.

Oklo Reports Right of First Refusal to Purchase Land in Southern Ohio

World Nuclear News reported on February 5 that a land rights agreement was signed with the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative (SODI). SODI is a DOE-designated community reuse organization for the former Portsmouth gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant, and the agreement with Oklo Inc. is a step toward the deployment of a compact fast neutron reactor called the Aurora "powerhouse". Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said, "we see incredible potential in the Piketon region, both in its talent and infrastructure, and we deeply value partnering with SODI and collaborating with the local community." The land rights agreement builds on a "non-binding memorandum of understanding between Oklo and SODI from May 2023," according to the report. Oklo envisages building its second and third power plants at Ohio's Piketon site.

Final Public Meeting on East Palestine Derailment Scheduled

On February 8, Railway Age reported that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will return to East Palestine, Ohio on June 25 for its final meeting on the early February 2023 derailment of a train carrying hazardous materials. It was also announced that NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy is planning to hold two community meetings on June 24 and June 25 to ensure the public has the opportunity to direct questions to the agency about its investigative process. The community meetings and the final meeting will be held at the East Palestine High School. The meeting can be attended in person or virtually on the NTSB YouTube Channel.

Constellation Energy Corp Files for Clinton License Renewal

World Nuclear News reported on February 16 that Constellation filed the license renewal application with the NRC and, in so doing, commenced a comprehensive regulatory review process of both safety and environmental issues. Constellation President and CEO Joe Dominguez indicated that 2016 state legislation combined with Federal nuclear production tax credits as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law makes the continued operation of the Clinton Plant in De Witt County, Illinois possible. The legislation provides policy support until 2032 but the current operating license of Clinton expires in April 2027. "Renewing the license of Clinton would provide the State of Illinois an estimated 179 terawatt hours of additional carbon-free electricity over the 20-year extended lifespan of the license," Dominguez said. Constellation also intends to file a second license renewal application for the Dresden nuclear power plant near Morris, Illinois later in 2024. The Dresden units are currently licensed to operate until 2029 and 2031 respectively.