Stateline Midwest ~ October 2012

In the Prairie Island Indian Community, some residents live as close as 600 yards from a facility storing highly radioactive spent fuel from a nearly 40-year-old nuclear power plant. The southeast Minnesota community has unwillingly become what state Public Utilities Commissioner David Boyd calls a “de facto storage site” for nuclear waste. And it is not alone.

Across the Midwest, in eight different states, a total of 16,800 metric tons of uranium is being stored at 22 nuclear power plants. One state in the region, Illinois, is home to nearly 13 percent of the nation’s 67,450 metric tons of uranium, the highest percentage in the country.

The electric ratepayers in dozens of states have been charged billions to build a site to store nuclear waste. As waste continues to be generated and stored on-site at power plants,   the President's Blue Ribbon Panel on America's Nuclear Future has suggested new strategies to manage spent fuel and create sites for interim storage for waste.
 

The U.S. nuclear industry took immediate steps to secure critical safety systems after Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was hit with a natural disaster last year, said Joe Pollock, executive director of Fukushima coordination for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Nuclear reactors in the United States are safer than those in Japan, but there’s still room for improvement, according to speakers on The Council of State Governments Eastern Regional Conference’s webinar, Nuclear Safety in the Northeast, June 19.

Remember to mark your calendar for CSG's upcoming webinar, "The U.S. Nuclear Industry A Year After Fukushima", on Tuesday, June 26th from 2-3PM EDT. Experts from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) will update state policymakers on the steps the U.S. nuclear energy industry is taking to ensure safe operations to apply lessons learned from the tragic tsunami in Japan.

Please join CSG for an upcoming webinar, "The U.S. Nuclear Industry A Year After Fukushima", on Tuesday, June 26th from 2-3PM EDT. Experts from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) will update state policymakers on the steps the U.S. nuclear energy industry is taking to ensure safe operations to apply lessons learned from the tragic tsunami in Japan.

On June 19th, CSG's Eastern Regional Conference will host a webinar entitled, "Nuclear Safety in the Northeast" from 12 PM - 1 PM EDT. Presentations for the webinar will be made by Andrew Kadak, the Director of Nuclear Services at Exponent Engineering and Scientific Consulting and by David Lochbaum, the Director of the Nuclear Safety Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

For the first time in more than 30 years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the go-ahead to build reactors at two existing nuclear power plants—one in Georgia and one in South Carolina. Some pundits have said this signals a nuclear renaissance for the United States, while experts agree that it’s more of a nuclear thaw.

“We are in expansion mode,“ said Steve Kerekes, senior director of media relations for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a policy organization representing the nuclear industry. “We readily acknowledge it’s going to be a fairly measured expansion. At best, we’ll have five new reactors online by the end of this decade.”