DOE skewers INL management over radiation accident
SVEN BERG
sberg@postregister.com

A report released Wednesday places the blame for the radiation exposure of 16 Idaho National Laboratory employees squarely on the shoulders of laboratory management.

Missed opportunities, inadequate safety assessments and ineffective training were among INL's failures that contributed to the exposure, according to a 123-page report by the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the lab.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dec. 13, 2011
CONTACT: Snake River Alliance
Liz Woodruff, Executive Director
208-344-9161 (w); 208-871-4597 (c)

Areva’s Delay in Idaho Uranium Factory No Surprise

Snake River Alliance Has Questioned Need for Project Since Beginning

Today’s announcement by French-owned Areva Enrichment Services that it is suspending construction of its planned uranium enrichment factory near Idaho Falls comes as no surprise and is further evidence that the so-called “nuclear renaissance” is a mirage, the Snake River Alliance said.

John R. Longenecker, a consultant in the nuclear fuel business, said the problem for USEC was that there were too many other players in the market in a world awash in enrichment capacity. The industry had hoped for a renaissance that would result in many more reactors, he said, but “if that happened, I blinked and missed it.”

And there are large inventories of highly enriched uranium from decades of past production, much of it from decommissioned weapons. “We’ve got 100 years of high-enriched uranium in storage,” Mr. Longenecker said. With additional material coming out of uranium weapons, there is enough “probably for 1,000 years of whatever naval fuel we need.”