In an incident report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday evening the utility reports:

ACCIDENTAL DISCHARGE OF FIREARM

“At approximately 1715 EDT on 10/27/11, a Security Officer accidentally discharged his weapon and wounded himself in the foot. An ambulance and Monroe County Sheriff reported to the site. The officer was transported offsite to a local hospital. This is being reported under 10CFR50.72(b)(2)(xi).”

The officer was clearing his weapon following his shift when the accident occurred. No other individuals were hurt.

The NRC Resident Inspector has been notified.

Fermi 2 is a 1,098 megawatt General Electric boiling water reactor that has the same design as those at Fukushima and has been in operation since 1988.

In May an operator at the plant was suspended for duty after testing positive for cocaine during a random drug test.

However, according to Greg Mello of the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group, a LANL watchdog, the project creates very few new jobs for New Mexicans — perhaps as few as 300 — over its projected 10-year-long construction. Moreover, the unofficial cost of the building by the time of its actual completion could run as high as $12 billion. And, he says, its real purpose is the creation of nuclear warheads, each of which would have 50 times greater capacity and impact than the bomb used on Nagasaki in 1945. “Basically,” said Mello, “it’s making weapons of mass destruction.”

Although federal officials assented to the their plans (which, by LASG’s estimation, has already cost $458 million just to get it to this planning stage) for the construction of the new lab, approval by both the U.S. House and Senate is still necessary.

The incident is said to have occurred at 1:30pm on May 5.

DTE spokesman Guy Cerullo said that for reasons of employee confidentiality details of the incident such as the worker’s duties and the drug involved will not be released. Though the company’s report to the NRC said that the employee’s access to plant has been terminated, Cerullo could not confim that the employee has been fired.

Fermi 2 is a 1,098 megawatt General Electric boiling water reactor of the same design as those at Fukushima. It has been in operation since 1988.

The plant is currently operating at 100 percent power.

“Wall Street banks are unwilling to finance new nuclear power facilities, and as a result these projects are unlikely to go forward without the United States government providing billions of dollars in loan guarantee support,” Rep. Markey wrote in a May 6 letter to OMB Director Jacob Lew. “It is my belief that if any of these deals are to go forward, the terms of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants must be as transparent to the public as possible, they must fully incorporate all known market risks, and they must go as far as possible in protecting American taxpayers from having to bailout the nuclear industry in the event of a loan default.”

Markey asked OMB to explain how Fukushima has affected the way the agency views the risks of financing nuclear plants.

He also asked the agency whether the terms of a $8.6 billion conditional loan guarantee issued last year for a project in Georgia by the Southern Company will be reevaluated in light of Fukushima.

Consumption of these foods could lead to excess radiation exposure, particularly for children.

The Euratom Directive of 13 May 1996 establishes general principles and safety standards on radiation protection in Europe.

According to the directive, the impact of nuclear activity can be considered negligible if doses of radiation do not exceed ten micro sieverts (mSv) per year. Beyond this value, possible measures should be considered to reduce exposure, it says.
While radioactive iodine-131 is mostly present in the air in the form of gas, CRIIRAD notes that in the case of the Fukushima fallout, the main issue is to limit ingestion of iodine-131.

CRIIRAD notes that the amount of iodine-131 capable of delivering a dose of 10 mSv varies greatly depending on the age of consumers. Children up to two years old are the most vulnerable and ingestion of 50 becquerel (Bq) is enough to deliver to the body a dose of 10 mSv, according to the institute.

If the foods (leafy vegetables, milk etc.) contain between one and 10 Bq per kg or more, it is possible that the reference level of 10 mSv may be exceeded within two to three weeks, the institute added.

Radioactive iodine-131 values measured by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) in recent days show the following, varying levels of contamination: 0,08 Bq/kg in salad, spinach and leeks in Aix-en-Provence, 0,17 Bq per litre in milk in Lourdes and 2,1 Bq per litre in goats milk in Clansayes.

Data for the west coast of the United States, which received the Fukushima radioactive fallout 6-10 days before France, reveals that levels of radioactive iodine-131 concentration are 8-10 times higher there, the institute says.

Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that milk in Phoenix and Little Rock contained more than the maximum allowable level of iodine-131. It also found cesium-137 in milk from Vermont.

The Uranium Resources Stewardship Act introduced by U.S. Reps. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján would shift the regulation of uranium mining from the 1872 Mining Law to the Mineral Leasing Act and require royalty payments to federal and state governments similar to those paid by the coal, oil and gas industries.

Last year, Udall introduced SB 796, which would have studied “whether uranium should fall under the Mineral Leasing Act system and be subject to a federal royalty that is shared with the state.” But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has consistently blocked any significant reform of the 1872 Mining Law, which was passed by the Grant administration to encourage settlement of the West by miners in the late 19th century.

“It’s time to seriously consider whether uranium should still be classified as a ‘locatable mineral’ governed by the hard-rock mining laws,” Udall told the Colorado Independent last year. Critics of the U.S. uranium mining industry say it is dominated by foreign companies taking advantage of a lack of royalties on federal lands, and that too often toxic waste has been left for American taxpayers to clean up.

Udall is a proponent of reviving the U.S. nuclear power industry to combat climate change by reducing the amount of fossil fuels being consumed to produce electricity. But members of the Colorado conservation community say the state has for too long been on the hook for the “dirty front end” of the uranium mining industry.

“Taxpayers have been fleeced out of millions of dollars in royalties from uranium companies mining on public lands,” Earthworks Policy Director Lauren Pagel said in a release. “The Uranium Resources Stewardship Act charges a moderate 12.5-percent royalty on uranium, which will allow the industry to contribute to cleaning up old uranium mine sites that continue to pollute water and harm nearby communities.”

Uranium prices have dropped in recent weeks due to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, but they’re still up dramatically over the last decade, and Udall says the United States must continue to pursue new nuclear power facilities. He’s introduced a bill this session that would facilitate the construction of smaller, “modular” nuclear reactors.

In a notice in the March 30 Federal Register DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wrote that on Feb. 24 Bruce Power asked for special arrangements so that it could transport the large generators for recycling and volume reduction in Sweden.

The initial leg of transport would be by road and entirely within Canada. The steam generators would then be loaded on a vessel in Owen Sound, Ontario for transport to Sweden via Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario and interconnecting waterways as well as the St. Lawrence River. At various times the vessel would necessarily enter U.S. waters. Therefore, under IAEA special arrangement provisions, the U.S. would need to revalidate the Canadian certificate in order to permit transport.
PHMSA is recognized as the IAEA Competent Authority for the U.S. and is responsible for competent authority approval in these cases.

PHMSA intends to conduct a fully independent review of the proposed transport including safety, environmental, and fitness assessments, in consultation with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and U.S. Coast Guard. PHMSA must approve, deny, or institute additional controls regarding
the transport in the request for competent authority approval.

A group of over 70 mayors from U.S. and Canadian towns along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway have warned that this shipment could endanger public water supplies.

The magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan on March 11 changed both the nature and the tenor of the discussion in Colorado – a state that produced some of the uranium ore used in developing the nation’s first nuclear weapons.

Hearings last month for a proposed up-zoning in Pueblo County that would allow for a clean energy park and a nuclear power plant drew large crowds of area residents concerned about events in Japan. The zoning change will reportedly be decided on April 25, but likely not before more heated protests. In fact, the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club is holding a “Stand up Against Nuclear Power” rally from 4 to 6 p.m. today at the Pueblo County Courthouse at 215 W. 10th St.

And there has been renewed scrutiny of the more than 14 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel being stored at Colorado’s one and only (and now defunct) nuclear power plant — Fort St. Vrain between Greeley and Longmont near the town of Platteville. Americans are more nervous than ever about natural disasters or terrorist attacks targeting growing stockpiles of nuclear waste.

Uranium 

All of these factors have combined to send uranium prices plummeting and to raise a new round of questions about the viability of Colorado’s uranium mining industry, which is currently being driven mostly by Canadian companies. As of March 28, a pound of uranium was selling for $62.50, down $7.25 a pound from a month ago.

Frank Filas, environmental manager for Energy Fuels, admitted it’s been a tough couple of weeks, but he added that his company, which has been approved to build the nation’s first new uranium mill in decades, is still finding investors.

“We’re raising $10 million this week and that’s more than adequate to fund our short-term plans as far as through the year and into early next year, but that incident [Fukushima] made us delay our plans a little bit because of that,” said Filas, whose Toronto-based company has won both state and county approval for the Piñon Ridge Mill in western Montrose County.

“From a realistic perspective, you’ve got a 40-year-old nuclear reactor [Fukushima] that got hit with a magnitude-9 earthquake and a 30-foot tsunami,” Filas said. “Given those circumstances, that’s not going to hurt the nuclear industry that much in the long run.”

Hilary White of the Telluride-based environmental group Sheep Mountain Alliance (SMA), which has sued both the state and county to stop the Piñon Ridge Mill, all along has questioned the financial viability of the plan.

“The price of both Energy Fuels stock and the spot price of uranium was falling before this accident [in Japan],” White said. “Energy Fuels has been a highly speculative, cash-poor company throughout this process and it is very likely the financing for the proposed mill would not have happened regardless of the situation in Japan.”

And White says the facility poses serious health and environmental risks stemming from the proposed milling operations.

“SMA continues to focus our efforts on the specific problems with the proposed mill site, such as a lack of detailed emergency planning and preparedness, impacts to Paradox Valley, and our concerns with air and water quality that remain unaddressed,” White said.

Filas counters that uranium mining, the front-end of nuclear power, poses nowhere near the risks of the power-producing back end.

“There’s very little risk on our end of the industry because basically we’re mining uranium and vanadium ore and those are natural resources with relatively low levels of radiation,” Filar said. “It’s not until you take that uranium yellowcake that we produce and ship it to several more stages of processing where they concentrate the uranium 235 that it becomes much more radioactive.”

Sharyn Cunningham of the Cañon City-based Colorado Citizens Against ToxicWaste has been battling the Cotter Mill uranium-processing facility near her hometown for years, fighting Cotter’s attempts to resume and expand operations before fully cleaning up old contamination issues. She disagrees about the less impactful nature of the mining end of nuclear power.

“What I’ve been involved in researching and learning about since 2002 was the front end of the nuclear fuel production, which is the mining, milling, conversion and enrichment [of uranium], so I’m well aware of the contamination and the expense to the taxpayer just to produce fuel for a nuclear reactor,” Cunningham said. “So personally – and I think it reflects the opinion of a lot of other people – if Pueblo County rezones for a nuclear reactor, it will absolutely encourage uranium mining and milling in Colorado.”

Filas said people who are opposed to nuclear power in general tend to lump the mining end and the power production end together.

“I can certainly see people linking us with the reactors because if they’re against nuclear reactors, they’re going to be against us, and that’s where most of the opposition that we see ultimately comes from is from people who are convinced nuclear power is not a good way to go,” Filas said.

Editor’s note: This is part three in a three-part series by the Colorado Independent on the future of the nuclear power industry. Read part one and part two here.

The DEQ maintains a continuously running air sampler in Lansing that processes 50 liters of air per minute for a total of 504,000 liters last week. The average human uses 7 liters of air per minute.

On Monday an analysis of last weeks sample showed a total activity of 23 picocuries or 0.85 becquerels of iodine-131.

“These are scant detection levels, even when compared to the radiation levels people are exposed-to every day,” DEQ said in a release. “For example, a typical banana contains 15 becquerels of potassium 40, a common radioactive isotope.”

Iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days and concentrates in the thyroid glands of exposed people. Cesium-137, another isotope associated with the Fukushima disaster, has a half life of 30 years and concentrates in bone.

Air samples taken in California have shown traces of cesium-137 from Japan.

Ken Yale of the DEQ’s Radiological Protection Division said that the Michigan air sample shows no cesium-137 in excess of typical background levels.

The state does not have measurements of radioactive isotopes in precipitation.

Snow is difficult to measure, Yale said, and it hasn’t rained since Tuesday when the department installed a system to monitor rain.

In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania state and Virginia officials have measured iodine-131 in rainwater at levels that exceed those established for drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said these levels found don’t pose a health threat with short term exposure.

In Washington state iodine-131 was found in milk this week.

Michigan monitors milk for radioactive isotopes on a weekly basis, Yale said, and results from last week should be available soon.

Radioactive pollution is expected to continue to spread throughout the northern hemisphere as the nuclear disaster continues in Japan.

Pueblo attorney Don Banner struck a nerve last week with his proposal for a new clean energy park that would include a nuclear power plant. His rezoning request will likely be decided by the Pueblo County commissioners next month, but not before the plan sparked heated debate in the wake of Japan’s ongoing nuclear power crisis.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall has long been a proponent of launching a nuclear power renaissance in the United States to combat the climate change impacts of carbon-spewing fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, which currently dominate as the nation’s preferred and cheapest methods of generating electricity. Nuclear, largely on hold in the U.S. since the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania in 1979, still produces 20 percent of the nation’s electrical power.

Udall would not directly address Banner’s nuclear power plant concept in Pueblo, but the Democratic senator did say the earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant should serve as a serious wake-up call for the nation’s new-found nuclear ambitions.

“The tragedy in Japan should give us all pause,” Udall told the Colorado Independent this week. “It’s a reminder of how important it is to ensure we proceed carefully and cautiously on nuclear energy, especially regarding spent fuel storage. We need to review our own nuclear facilities and future plans to ensure we’re prepared not only for disaster, but also to deal with the waste.”

Spent nuclear fuel rods stored onsite at Fukushima Daiichi have exacerbated the crisis and hampered response efforts, and the New York Times this week reported similar waste-storage situations exist at many of the 104 nuclear reactors currently operating in the United States. Efforts to establish a national repository for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been derailed by politics.

Colorado’s only foray into nuclear power ended in 1989 when the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station near Platteville, between Longmont and Greeley, was permanently shut down. Now, about a quarter of a mile from Xcel Energy’s gas-fired power plant there, more than 14 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sits inside of 1,464 graphite blocks within what’s known as an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI).

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s license to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to continue storing the spent fuel in Colorado expires in November. The DOE has requested a 20-year extension.

“The best place is where it is right now, which is in our place,” said ISFSI facility manager Ted Borst when asked if Fort St. Vrain’s spent fuel needs to be moved. “And in my mind what I hope we’ll end up doing with all the fuel is recycling and reusing it, because you only use about 10 percent of the energy when you put it through the reactor, so there’s a lot of energy there that’s still renewable if you just want to reuse it, recycle it.”

For instance, the proposed Pueblo power plant might be a logical recipient of Fort St. Vrain’s spent fuel, Borst said, adding, “I’ve heard talk about that energy park down there and that nuclear might be a part of that, so who knows?”

Banner currently does not have a developer or utility on board to finance or build a nuclear plant near Pueblo. Asked if Xcel Energy, which operated Fort St. Vrain as Public Service Co. of Colorado from 1979 to 1989, would be interested in a Pueblo nuclear plant or in building a new nuclear facility anywhere in Colorado, spokesman Mark Stutz offered the company’s overarching philosophy on nuclear power.

“It’s a complicated answer, but generally we believe nuclear power should at least be considered in future discussions on additional or replacement generation resources in Colorado,’ Stutz said, adding the Minnesota-based utility – Colorado’s largest power provider – currently doesn’t operate any nuclear facilities in Colorado but has three reactors active in Minnesota. “So we obviously support nuclear power.”

Fort St. Vrain was a unique, high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor that used helium in order to reduce the amount of water utilized by conventional reactors. Borst, who began working at the plant in 1980, said that design was implemented specifically because of Colorado’s lack of water resources. Operating inefficiencies, however, ultimately led to Fort St. Vrain being the first commercial nuclear plant to be shut down in the United States.

Still. Borst thinks advances in gas-cooled reactor technology make it a viable option for a future Colorado nuclear power plant.

“That design does make sense,” Borst said, “and the Department of Energy is looking at some advanced high-temperature gas-cooled designs right now. We did work a lot of kinks out of the system, and I’m convinced a new plant of that design would work a lot better and make sense for Colorado where we don’t have a whole lot of water.”

But critics of Banner’s Pueblo plan say he lacks the water rights to properly service even a gas-cooled reactor.

“His Achilles heel to this project is the water,” said Sharyn Cunningham of Colorado Citizens Against ToxicWaste, an organization that has fought Cotter Corp. for years over its ongoing cleanup of the Cotter Mill uranium processing facility near Cañon City.

“On top of that, if they put a nuclear site there – just like Fort St. Vrain – that is land with waste forever,” Cunningham added. “From now until forever. It never goes away. They’re not going to be taking it somewhere, unless something drastically changes about making a national repository. You are basically leaving something that you have to depend on regulators to protect you from forever.”

Not a problem, Borst said – at least at Fort St. Vrain. As a contractor to the DOE, Borst said all contingencies to safeguard the spent fuel have been fully covered.

“Their minds should be at ease,” he said of public concerns. The facility is very robust and it’s designed to take a design-basis earthquake, a design-basis tornado. We even have a design-basis flood in there, which there isn’t a whole lot of water around there and we’re kind of sitting above the rivers so it’s kind of hard to see how a flood could happen.”

In the long run, Borst said he thinks the disaster in Japan – which has badly shaken public confidence in nuclear power around the world – may wind up being a boost for the industry.

“I think what we’ll find out is it was a really bad accident and the consequences were not all that bad, so I think in the final analysis it will be a plus for the nuclear side to say that in spite of the magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami, which nobody planned on, things are not going to be all that catastrophic once everything gets straightened out and people understand what really happened over there,” Borst said.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series on the future of nuclear power in Colorado. Part 2 will be posted on Monday, March 28.