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The post Canada Plan to Store Nuclear Waste near Lake Huron Draws U.S. Ire appeared first on POWER Magazine.
A group of U.S. lawmakers has asked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reconsider that country’s proposed plan to store its nuclear waste at a site near Lake Huron, northeast of Detroit, Michigan.
The site, at Huron-Konloss/South Bruce, in Bruce County, Ontario, is one of two communities chosen by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), which consists of Canada’s nuclear power generating companies and includes Ontario Power Generation, New Brunswick Power Corp., and Hydro-Quebec. The NWMO was established by Canada’s parliament in 2002, and is responsible for designing and implementing the country’s plan for the long-term management of used nuclear fuel.
Bruce County is home to Ontario Power Generation’s Bruce Nuclear Generation Station, the country’s largest nuclear power plant with more than 6 GW of generation capacity. The station, known as Bruce Power, has eight reactors, the most of any operating nuclear station worldwide.…
Scotland, which is authorized to set its own energy policy separate from London’s Westminster government, has set a goal of generating 100% of the nation’s annual electricity needs through only renewable sources by 2020, and 100% of its entire power and transportation needs from non-carbon energy by 2030. This decision has created an all-of-the-above clean development strategy as well as a stronger commitment to energy self-reliance. By looking inward at what internal resources exist, Scotland is now home to the most-advanced wave and tidal energy development center in the world.
For decades, engineers have been trying to turn the immense potential of tidal energy into electricity. While ocean currents don’t reach the same speeds that wind can, the inherent energy potential by comparison is enormous. Seawater has more than 800 times the density of air, so for the same rotor swept area, water moving at 2.5 meters per second (m/sec)—roughly 5 knots—exerts the same amount of force as would be applied by wind blowing at nearly 100 m/sec (about 195 knots).…
DTE Energy has filed plans with the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to build a 1,100-MW natural gas-fired power plant on about 100 acres east of the existing Belle River Power Plant, northeast of Detroit near the Canadian border. The August 1 filing confirms the proposal that DTE discussed with local officials last fall for a new plant at the site. DTE said it expects the plant will begin operating in 2022.
The proposed $ 1 billion plant, located in East China Township in St. Clair County, is part of the utility’s plan to replace coal-fired electricity production in the region as it seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 30% by the early 2020s, and by more than 80% by 2050. DTE has said it will retire three coal-fired plants, located in Trenton, River Rouge, and St. Clair in the Detroit area, between 2020 and 2023. The certificate of necessity filed with the MPSC calls for construction of the new plant to begin in 2019, pending state approval; the state has 270 days to respond to the filing.…
A Tennessee utility company on July 20 said tests on drinking water in the vicinity of a coal-fired power plant in Memphis showed no detectable evidence of arsenic, lead, and other toxins. The Sierra Club asked state officials to perform the tests after high levels of arsenic were found in monitoring wells at the Allen Fossil Plant.
Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) said in a statement that the tests were conducted by an independent lab on 10 wells at the Allen site. The wells, which monitor pollution from coal ash ponds at the plant, supply water to a pumping station near the plant, which is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
The Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation (TDEC) asked MLGW to test the wells after recent water samples showed one well had high levels of arsenic, reported as more than 300 times the federal drinking-water standard, and traces of lead were found in two wells. The monitoring wells at the plant are about 50 feet deep and are located about a half-mile from much-deeper wells the TVA has drilled into the Memphis Sand aquifer, which supplies drinking water to Memphis.…
Domestic uranium production is falling to levels not seen since the early 2000s, which are themselves equal to production during the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1950s. Prospects for any sort of rebound look bleak, as a joint venture between GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba is looking to import Russian-designed fuel assemblies for use in U.S. reactors.
U.S. uranium production, which peaked at nearly 45 million pounds of uranium concentrate (U3O8) in 1980, fell precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s before leveling off at around 5 million pounds since 1991, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The U.S. produced 3.7 million pounds in 2015 while importing 57 million pounds, about half of it from Canada and Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, U.S. uranium inventories have climbed steadily during the 2000s, reaching 121 million pounds at the end of 2015, the EIA said—enough to supply two years of domestic demand. But that glut, and spot prices that have fallen steadily over the same period, have not deterred the major players from looking for new sources of uranium.…