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Report touts lessons from era of nuclear waste negotiator
As the Department of Energy embarks on its consent-based process for siting a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, a new report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA highlights relevant lessons from the federal government’s now defunct Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator.
Established under Title IV of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the office, an independent agency within the executive branch, was primarily active from 1990 to 1995. Its role was to engage with state and tribal governments to find an acceptable and suitable host site for a repository.
The full report, Lessons from the Nuclear Waste Negotiator Era of the 1990s for Today’s Consent-Based Siting Efforts, is now available online. Its executive summary is available here.
W. Brian Clarke
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 122-127
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A253
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of lead vials of internal volume 1.0 cm3 were charged with ~200 mg of carbon catalyst containing 0.5% Pd and 0.4% Pd. The vials were clamped to stainless steel manifolds on a vacuum line, then pumped out and filled with high-purity H2 or D2 at a pressure of 152 cm Hg and a temperature of 23°C. Several vials contained ordinary activated carbon instead of palladium-carbon, and some vials contained only H2 or D2. All the vials were stored in a sandbox heated to ~200°C for times up to 45 days before mass spectrometer measurements of 3He and 4He were made. No evidence was found for the high concentrations of 4He claimed in similar experiments by several other researchers. The upper limit for the concentration excess of 4He in D2 in vials containing palladium-carbon is 11 ppt (parts per trillion) at the 95% confidence level. This limit for 4He may be compared with previous claims in similar experiments of 100 ppm (parts per million) by Case and 11 ppm by George and McKubre et al.