Environmental Justice

October 17, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

A Uranium Mining Test for the EPA: Stronger Water Projections Needed, not Weaker

Another test of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its anti-environmental chief Scott Pruitt is underway, and the result will trumpet the agency’s uranium footprint for decades to come. Will EPA’s Congressional mandate be replaced by Everybody’s Poison Adventures?

Now a proposed EPA rule change could put the uranium industry “on a path to a full accounting of the environmental harms and costs of the nuclear fuel chain,” writes Geoff Fettus, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which submitted 60 pages of technical and legal comment on the proposed rules. The comment period just ended, and more than 44,000 citizens and groups weighed demanding justice for the affected communities and long-term protections from future mining.

The rule changes, titled “Health and Environmental Protection Standards for Uranium and Thorium Mill Tailings,” regard water quality, clean-up requirements, and new mining practices. First proposed late in the Obama Administration, a revised set of rules put up by EPA’s Pruitt and Co. weaken protections to groundwater included in the first proposal. The weaker rules would shorten the duration of long-term monitoring after mining concludes, and the lower standards for setting original baseline groundwater quality.

Communities and drinking water across the western U.S., from Texas to Wyoming, have for 70 years been contaminated by uranium mining. Uranium is a natural radioactive and toxic heavy metal, and there are some 15,000 abandoned uranium mines and mills in the west, mostly located on Native North American Indian Reservations. Mountains of abandoned uranium ore tailings, some 190 million metrtic tons at licensed mill sites,* have been left in the open air.

Since uranium mining is mostly done in dry, windy desert areas, radioactive dust is easily dispersed by winds and rains. Surface and underground waters are then contaminated by uranium and its byproducts including lead 210 and polonium 210. These radioactive materials also accumulate in the plants and sediments of rivers, ponds and lakes.

Uranium mine and mill workers suffer similar illnesses and elevated death rates from cancers, kidney and breathing diseases known to be associated with the radiation and heavy metal toxins released by uranium mining. Yet the polluting companies have done little to compensate sickened workers or clean up their contaminated sites, even after disasters like the worst radioactive spill in U.S. history — the 1979 uranium mine dam collapse on the Navajo Nation near Church Rock, NM that poured 94 million gallons of radioactive waste to the Puerco River, poisoning drinking water in downriver communities.

Current EPA rules for uranium mining endanger public health and the environment, the Defense Council’s Fettus says, because they don’t address “in-situ leaching” (ISL), also known as acid leach mining which employs highly corrosive and deadly sulfuric acid. Fettus wrote in an Oct. 16 letter that “regulations promulgated decades ago did not contemplate ISL uranium recovery and its associated harms,” and are “wholly inadequate to the task of protecting scarce western US groundwater resources.”

Most acid leach uranium mining in the US has taken place in the “inter-mountain west” and new or expanded acid mining is in the works, especially with new EPA chief Pruitt and the president having zero tolerance for pesky safe water regulations. The desert southwest is seeing rapid population growth, prolonged droughts, and simultaneous resource extraction projects (like coal bed methane drilling). All this causes severe competition for surface and underground water which these industries use in great quantities. Permanent contamination — that is, the total loss — of underground freshwater (aquifers) has been caused by acid leach mining and will again, unless stringent rules are adopted and enforced.

Attorney Fettus sounded an alarm in his letter, noting, “Any attempt by EPA, under the administration of industry lobbyist Scott Pruitt, to further weaken the standards violates federal law and contradicts the established science of uranium recovery and its impact on groundwater.” Contact the Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc.org) to amplify your efforts as a water protector.

— John LaForge

* Arjun Makhijani, Howar Hu, & Ketherine Yih, Nuclear Wastelands, The MIT Press, 2000, p. 122.

September 4, 2017 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Choose Your Experts: “Radiation Is Good for You” or “There’s No Safe Dose”

By John LaForge

The old canard that “a little radiation exposure is good for you,” peddled by nuclear power advocates and nuclear waste generators, repeatedly needs refuting because the industry relentlessly downplays the dangers of radiation. It recently convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken water pollution law and allow increased levels of radioactive poisons in our water.

Take David Ropeik writing in The Week, on Aug. 6 of all days, under the headline, “Should we really be so afraid of nuclear radiation?” Ropeik says, “The fear of ionizing (nuclear) radiation is deeply ingrained in the public psyche. For reasons partly historical and partly psychological, we simply assume that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous.”

No David, the reasons are scientific and factual. No less than the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous. The NAS has found repeatedly that there is no such thing as harmless radiation exposure, no “threshold” dose below which the exposure is safe.

No one need “simply assume” this. It’s a point of fact, made clear in the most comprehensive government studies of the dangers of radiation exposure, the National Academy’s seven BEIR reports (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation). Its most recent book-length study, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII,” was issued June 29, 2006. Consequently, every federal agency that regulates ionizing radiation warns that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, increases one’s risk of cancer.

Based on BEIR’s repeated declarations that there is no exposure so low as to be harmless, the US Environmental Protection Agency says for example, “There is no firm basis for setting a ‘safe’ level of exposure above background ….” and, “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer). ….no radiation exposure is completely risk free.” The National Council on Radiation Protection says, “[E]very increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.” The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, “[T]he radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, … any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.”

But nuclear power promoters like those at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s engineering department, particularly retired professors Michael Corradini and Max Carbon (his real name), still peddle the officially debunked “hormesis” theory: that low-dose exposures act like inoculations and help people build immunity to the damage done by radiation’s effects on cells. The conjecture is even applied to fetuses, infants, children, girls and women, all of whom were reported in the BIER-VII to be far more vulnerable to radiation’s harmful effects than the rest of the population.

Dr. Carbon and Dr. Corradini have no background in health physics or medicine, and taught nuclear reactor engineering. Like business page columnists or nuclear industry investors, they know that the strengthening of radiation protection standards and strictly enforcing current anti-pollution laws will cost the nuclear industry hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So for decades these vested interests have worked to weaken the regulations using the nonsense that a little radiation exposure won’t hurt you, and may even help.

The National Academy’s BEIR VII report, at page 315, politely refutes the hormesis humbug:

“The possibility that low doses of radiation may have beneficial effects (a phenomenon often referred to as ‘hormesis’) has been the subject of considerable debate. Evidence for hormetic effects was reviewed, with emphasis on material published since the 1990 BEIR-V study on the health effects of exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation. … [T]he preponderance of available experimental information does not support the contention that low levels of ionizing radiation have a beneficial effect.” [Emphasis added]

The late Herbert L. Abrams was chairman of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy’s committee that produced BIER VII. He said when it was published, “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless.” So when deciding about radiation, choose your experts wisely. Do you want health advice from medical doctors or reactor engineers?

June 30, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air

Library image: US Marines fire a Howitzer in northern Syria on March 24th 2017 in support of Coalition operations. (Photo: Airwars.org, via USMC/ Cpl. Zachery C. Laning)

A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.

With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. US drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from super-carriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Sat., June 24 when US bombs destroyed four houses.

Every child killed or maimed by US-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013 in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “US military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”

Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass US military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.

If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by US drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017 directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.

US offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]

In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a US gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.

The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The US dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.

Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”

Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.

This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as US drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” —John LaForge

June 26, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Remember Yucca Mountain? Cancelled and Shutdown in 2010, Some Want a Revival

Update 6/26/17: Legislation to restart the Yucca Mtn dump licensing process is moving forward in the House. Voice your opposition!

The common language in our struggles is understanding each link in the nuclear chain.

—Ian Zabarte, Western Shoshone

Summer Quarterly 2017

By Kelly Lundeen

If you thought the proposal to store highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was dead, check out the new lineup in Washington, DC. With powerful opponents Senator Harry Reid and former President Obama out of the political picture, some Republicans are attempting to revive the licensing process for the waste repository. Trump’s budget proposal requested $120 million for the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has requested $30 million, so the agencies can reopon the licensing process. A Yucca dump would target Western Shoshone lands with the nation’s 70,000-plus tons of waste reactor fuel which would come in from over 70 locations. The nuclear industry responsible for creating the radioactive waste is promoting Yucca and other centralized dumpsites in order to transfer liability to the public from the facilities where it is currently being generated and stored.

Opposition to the Waste Repository Continues

Luckily, the movement of Native American and anti- nuclear organizations that stopped the licensing process in 2010 remembers all of the reasons it has always been a bad idea: as a matter of Native sovereignty, science, environment, economy and politics. Considering the site under US federal ownership is a violation of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, and Yucca Mountain is held sacred by the Western Shoshone. It is located on the third most seismic region on the continent, near seven cinder cone volcanoes, 26 fault lines and contains a moving water table that would corrode canisters, making it geologically unstable and unsuitable. Transportation by road, rail and barge would expose 100 million people (about a third of the country’s population) living along these routes in the case of an accident. Any accident at the site, 90 miles from Las Vegas, or along the route as it passes through “the Strip,” would devastate the local tourism industry which brought 43 million visitors in 2016. In sum, 299 legal contentions to the application as it stood in 2010 would still require adjudication, resulting in over 400 days of hearings.

Opponents to the dump have maintained their network, knowledge and strength. Since the November election, the Native Community Action Council, the only party to the licensing process that is not federally funded, has hosted a forum to defend Yucca Mountain. The National Grassroots Radioactive Waste Summit created a Yucca Working Group that gathered 80 organizational signatures on a letter to Congress objecting to any licensing of the abandoned site. All but one member of Nevada’s congressional delegation and majority of Nevadans are opposed to the dump. Lawmakers have introduced legislation requiring informed consent from local tribes and governments prior to licensing. The bill would codify the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendation that consent-based siting be agreed before money from the federal Nuclear Waste Fund could be dispersed.

Some proponents of the site are undeterred and insist on following through with the portions of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) that made Yucca Mountain the destination for the nation’s high level radioactive waste. Dozens of disqualifying road- blocks have to be ignored to restart the process. Draft legislation to renew licensing proceedings, by amending the NWPA, has been heard in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. A few local politicians are driven by hopes of economic gain in return for accepting the waste. Commissioner Dan Schinhofen of Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, reportedly said, “… say give us $50 million up front, and give us $10 million a year.”

If funds for licensing are given Congressional approval, get ready for years if not decades of litigation and direct action.

Elsewhere on the Radioactive Waste Front

Ten million of the $120 million requested for the DOE by Trump is for so-called “interim storage” in anticipation of long delays in licensing a dump at Yucca Mt. Two applications for such “interim” sites in controversial desert areas of Texas and New Mexico have been submitted to the NRC. Neither of the sites has undergone a consent-based siting or environmental impact process.

Waste Control Specialists, Inc. (WSC) has applied to accept more high-level waste at its site in Andrews County, Texas, but in April the firm suspended its application while in the process of being purchased by Energy Solutions, Inc. WCS has admitted to facing “enormous financial challenges.” Additionally, the Eddy Lea Energy Alliance and Holtec, Inc. applied in March to host 120,000 tons of high-level waste reactor in southeast New Mexico.

Meanwhile the DOE’s Deep Borehole Field Test proposal has been completely scrapped. The DOE had sought approval to test the feasibility of storing radioactive waste in boreholes three miles deep at sites in Texas, New Mexico and South Dakota, but confronted strong opposition from local communities. Although as an alternative waste site it has been suggested the newly discovered sinkhole in front of Mr. Trump’s luxury resort at Mar-a-Lago. After contractors faced resistance in every meeting with area residents in four potential locations, the agency announced, “Due to changes in budget priorities, the Department of Energy does not intend to continue supporting the Deep Borehole Field Test project.”

For updates on opposing bad radioactive waste storage and transport plans, follow the “Don’t Waste America” campaign of Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

—Dakota Free Press, May 24, 2017; Department of Energy, May 23, 2017; Las Vegas Sun, May 22, 2017; Indigenous Action Media, April 27, 2017; Nuclear Information and Resource Service, April, 2017; Native Community Action Council, 2017

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

First Nations Condemn High-Level Liquid Waste Shipments

By Arianne Peterson and John LaForge

Spring 2017 Quarterly

On February 22, both the Iroquois Caucus and Anishinabek Nation in Canada declared their opposition to plans to transport more than 5,812 gallons of extaordinarily radioactive waste in liquid form through their territories. The US Department of Energy (DOE) plan, backed by Atomic Energy Canada Limited and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, intend to send 100 to 150 truckloads of waste, over the course of four years, roughly 1,300 miles from Chalk River, Ontario to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina using public roads and bridges.

The never-before-attempted long range transports of high-level liquid waste are set to start this spring, following US District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s Feb. 2 ruling in favor of the DOE and against a challenge brought by a coalition of environmental groups led by Beyond Nuclear. The exact shipment routes for the waste are being kept secret due to terrorism concerns, but the convoys must pass over at least one waterway directly tied to the Great Lakes—the drinking supply for 40 million people. The waste liquid is so extremely toxic that just one quart of it, evenly dispersed, is enough to contaminate the entire drinking water supply of Washington, DC (a reservoir of just over 140 million gallons) above the safe drinking water standards of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We assert inherent ownership of the water and jurisdiction within our regions and traditional territories,” said Patrick Madahbee, the Grand Council Chief of 40 Anishinabek First Nations. “We will stand with our Iroquois allies to protect the drinking water. Water is the lifeblood of Mother Earth. Why would we put our precious resource in jeopardy? A spill into any of the waterways would have a tremendous impact on the Great Lakes. Millions of people would be affected—on both sides of the border.”

The weapons-grade waste material, which originated in the US and has been made almost 17,000 times more toxic and more radioactive through processing in Canada, will be “down-blended” at the Savannah River Site into a form that cannot be used for weapons. But critics point out that the process can be done onsite in Canada without putting dozens of communities and the Great Lakes environment at unnecessary and repeated risk of contamination.

The 6,000 gallons are so radioactively volatile that they cannot be shipped all at once, but sent in small, radioactive containers. The total has so much uranium-235 that combing it in a large shipment would risk a “criticality” accident—the uncontrolled chain reaction of nuclear fission—that would look like a bomb blast.

So much gamma radiation is expected to be emminating from the casks that extra long tractor-trailers are intended to separate drivers from the deadly hazard.

“The Iroquois Caucus is well aware that liquid of a very similar nature has been routinely solidified and stored at Chalk River since 2003,” Kahnawà:ke Grand Chief Joseph Tokwiro Norton explained.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples mandates that states ensure no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent. The Anishinabek Chiefs in Assembly in 2010 passed resolutions opposing the exporting and storage of nuclear waste by either land or water across the Anishinabek Nation, and Canada is a signatory to the UN Declaration.

The indigenous governments are joined by more than 22 municipal councils in the Niagara Peninsula that have passed resolutions opposing the transports.

Seven plaintiffs had urged the court to either suspend the shipments or require a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) in compliance with US environmental law, because such highly radioactive material has never before been transported over public roads in liquid form. But the February ruling deferred to the DOE’s earlier claims that transport of this deadly waste in liquid form poses no more dangers than hauling it in solid form—even without an EIS.

Mary Olson, Director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service’s Southeast Office, one of the plaintiffs, said,“Even without any leakage of the contents, people will be exposed to penetrating gamma radiation and damaging neutron radiation just by sitting in traffic beside one of the transport trucks.”

—Dr. Gordon Edwards, “Radioactive Roads: Transportation of Highly Radioactive Liquid Waste,” Feb. 21; Anishinabek News, Feb. 22; Iroquois Caucus, Feb. 22; WBFO News (Toronto) Feb. 21; and Aiken Standard, and BeyondNuclear.org, Feb. 3, 2017

A Uranium Mining Test for the EPA: Stronger Water Projections Needed, not Weaker

Choose Your Experts: “Radiation Is Good for You” or “There’s No Safe Dose”

Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air

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