Lake Superior Barrels

October 7, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Lake Superior Barrel Dump

Barrel Dump Scandal
Murky As Ever

By John LaForge

A lot has been written about the 1,448-plus barrels of toxic and probably radioactive wastes that were dumped into Lake Superior by the U.S. Army (Corps of Engineers).

You can get a very good, 100-page compilation of news accounts and analysis in Duluth for less than the cost of dinner and a movie. It’s a good read if your stomach can handle official graft, military contractor fraud, nighttime mobster-like “cement shoe treatment” of deadly industrial trash, and blunt bureaucratic dismissals of precautionary alarms.

The general public might want to know why no agency, corporation or individual has ever been held accountable for the illegal dumping; why the full extent of the dumping has never been detailed; why the contents of the barrels has never been fully made known; and why “the mystery of radioactive waste is still out there,” as Ron Swenson, of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s (MPCA’s) barrels investigation and oversight unit once said.

The wastes came from the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP), Minnesota’s largest Superfund site, which at the time was run by Honeywell, Corp.

For four years, between 1959 and 1962, barrels containing benzene, PCBs, lead, cadmium, barium, hexavalent chromium and most likely radioactive materials were rolled off barges into the lake at spots all along the north shore. One of the seven acknowledged dump sites (there are more) is within a mile of Duluth-Superior drinking water intake — just northeast of Brighton Beach. Three of the dump sites, including the water intake site, and another declared to encompass 75 square miles, are federally designated Superfund Sites (see: http://cqs.com/super_mn.htm, p.3 of 12).

In February, State Representative Mike Jaros wrote to the U.S. Senate and House urging that sediment testing be conducted prior to any moving of the aging barrels. In March the Save Lake Superior Association resolved unanimously to urge that all these barrels be removed and safely shipped to a hazardous waste containment site.

This would be a prudent thing to do — unless the 45-year-old barrels are weakened, broken open or leaking. After exhuming only nine barrels in 1990, the agencies responsible for protecting the environment dismissed the threat posed by the chemicals. ”We don’t believe there’s any short-term threat to human health,” said Ron Swenson of the MPCA.

This “think about it later” rationale for ignoring the threat raises more questions than it answers. As the MPCA’s Ron Swenson admitted in 1991, “What this means in the long term for public health, for the lake’s ecosystem … we still haven’t determined.” On April 16, Carl Herbrandson of the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) reported to researcher Dan Conley that the MDH had “decided to write a health consultation about what we know related to the barrels in Lake Superior and any potential health concerns.”

This report has yet to be issued, but the Army has already reached its own conclusions. In 1990, Corps spokesman Ken Gardner had the nerve to say to the Duluth News Tribune, “I’m sure if you got a few feet away from the barrels you wouldn’t find any traces of any of the chemicals … there is no public health threat.”

The Corps might be “sure,” but it appears to have lied about the barrels more than once. It first said there was nothing dangerous in them. It even produced several affidavits from former workers who swore they put “metal shavings” into the barrels.

The Corps told the MPCA in 1976 that there were only seven dump sites. However, Bob Cross of the MPCA’s spills unit told the St. Paul Pioneer in 1992 that a Corps supervisor had said that there were at least 16 dump sites.

On January 18, 1995 then Superior, now Duluth, Mayor Herb Bergson threatened to sue the Corps, the MPCA and Honeywell over a cleanup. No law suit ever materialized. Today, only the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and Mike Jaros appear committed enough to protecting the drinking water to confront the barrel issue directly. Red Cliff is pursuing removal of some barrels under its own authority as a sovereign nation.

The Army, Honeywell, the EPA, and the MPCA must be compelled do their legal duty. They must see to it that the water is protected from the cancer-causing materials in their degrading barrels.

To insure public and environmental safety, the responsible parties must be required to: 1) fund an independent scientific confirmation of the presence or absence of radioactive materials in the barrels, to identify and characterize the specific contents of the barrels, and to publicly identify their locations, 2) fund an investigation into the state of the barrels’ decay and the contamination, if any, of surrounding sediment, and 3) fund a barrel dump remediation program that does not threaten to contaminate drinking water sources – even if this means extending the water intake point away from the barrels.

Mayor Bergson complained in 1995 that, “The contents of at least 1,448 barrels are still unknown to the public,” and that “The location of many of the barrels is still unknown.”

Twelve years later, it’s about time for answers.

Lake Superior Barrel Dump Radiation:

“Cover Up” Allegation Made By Submarine Captain On its April 12, 1995 broadcast, KBJR TelevisionChannel 6 News (Duluth, Minnesota), interviewed Captain Harold Maynard, the submarine operator who went down to investigate one of the dump sites with his K-350 submersible, its mechanical arm, lights and communication system. To this day, Capt. Maynard alleges a “cover up” of the presence of radiation in the barrel site he examined. News Anchors Dave Jensch and Michelle Lee introduced the subject of the barrels and reporter (now News Director) Barbara Reyelts questioned Capt. Maynard. Surface tender ship operator Mike Stich of Hazard Control (Now All Safe) has corroborated Capt. Maynard’s statements. Capt. Maynard (Ret.) spoke with Nukewatch from his home in New York on May 9, 2008. He said that from inside his submarine, a Corps of Engineers’ Geiger counter registered radiation near one barrel, that the tether securing his sub to a surface ship was contaminated and made the Corps’ Geiger counter click, that the Corps of Engineers’ Bob Dempsey “has been denying that ever since,” and that Mr. Dempsey would not allow him to return with his sub to same place to verify his reading.

Transcript of KBJR-TV newscast, April 12, 1995:

  News Anchor MICHELLE LEE: Did the Army Corps of Engineers ignore and cover-up findings of radioactivity in the Lake Superior mystery barrels?
  News Anchor DAVE JENSCH: Environmentalists say “Yes,” and State and federal officials say “No.” The submarine captain who first took the readings says the whole thing has become a big cover-up.
  LEE: Channel 6 News tracked him down in New York and Barbara Reyelts brings us his story.
  Reporter BARBARA REYELTS: It was October 15, 1990. The Army Corps of Engineers had hired Harold Maynard and his submarine to probe the bottom of Lake Superior for barrels. From his home in New York, Captain Maynard tells us [that] as a precaution on that dive, he took onboard a Geiger counter provided by the Corps of Engineers.
  MAYNARD: … as I turned toward the barrel, about thirty feet off the bottom, I got a nuclear Geiger counter went off, started clickin’. I turned towards the barrel and when I got almost to the barrel it went off again. It was clickin’ again; low level.
  REYELTS: When Maynard resurfaced, Corps officials went over his sub with a Geiger counter. Maynard said it went off as it moved over the line that tethered the sub to surface craft.
  MAYNARD: When he got near that tether with that Geiger counter, it took off. It went right up the line. You could hear it rattling, click, click, click, click, click.
  REYELTS: Jack [Bob] Dempsey of the Army Corps went back down with Captain Maynard to read the levels himself. In a telephone interview, he tells us:
  DEMPSEY: We anchored ourselves as close to the same spot as possible for a good hour … But we could never repeat Mr. Maynard’s readings.
  REYELTS: But Maynard says the Corps refused to go back to the spot where the radioactivity was detected.
  MAYNARD: The nuclear readings that I got, the low-level ones, were in the south of this barrel field. They wouldn’t let me go back there again. They kept me to the north and to the east.
  CHUCK WILLIAMS, (then director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency): Uh, as far, uh, as, uh, these stories, you know, I started to get really tired of it.
  REYELTS: Chuck Williams, Director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, admits they got a radioactive reading, but says the whole thing is being blown out of proportion.
  WILLIAM S: I think that he, uh, yah, is mistaken. And if he’s willing step forward and, uh, umm, uh, and show us the documentation, uh, we’ll certainly take a look at it. But I don’t think he can do that.
  REYELTS: Maynard says that he has done it. He says he signed a sworn affidavit saying that he encountered radioactive levels while scanning the mystery barrels. Now, he says the whole thing is making him mad.
  MAYNARD: When it [the report] came back and said that the Corps had denied any reading, [that] really upset me, ‘cause now one of us is a liar, and I got no reason to lie.
  REYELTS: Duluth environmentalists brought the issue before the city council this week, and at the upcoming agenda session councilors will take a deeper look. In Duluth, Barbara Reyelts, Channel 6 News.
  MICHELLE LEE: It’s estimated it would cost 12 million dollars to bring up the remaining fourteen-hundred-plus barrels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUk9jcmEv_Y

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July 11, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Lake Superior Barrels: Red Cliff Will Seek Funds for Repeat of Knife River Survey

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2016

Between 1957 and 1962 at least 1,458 barrels of toxic and radioactively contaminated military waste, from Honeywell’s Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant in Arden Hills, Minnesota, was secretly dumped by the Army Corps of Engineers into Lake Superior along Minnesota’s North Shore. Almost all the barrels are still in the water.

Nukewatch has long demanded the identification, recovery and proper disposal of the barrels that remain intact. (See our special report, “Drinking Water at Risk: Toxic Military Waste Haunts Lake Superior,” January 2013.) Our work has helped keep this scandal in the public eye and has earned some hard-won success.

It appears that Nukewatch’s insistence has resulted in an important expansion of the ongoing investigation being conducted by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The Band’s Lake Superior barrels study has been funded by major grants from a Pentagon program for remediation of Formerly Used Defense Sites.

The breakthrough regards the Knife Island/Knife River dump site 10 miles north of Duluth, Minnesota (one of at least seven barrel dumping areas) and was revealed last November in a public presentation by Frank Koehn, a spokesperson for the Band. Since 2012, the Band has reported that only a “debris field” and no identifiable barrels could be seen in its underwater sonar pictures of the Knife Island site.

But in four detailed letters, Nukewatch provided the Band with official documentation of over 700 barrels having been dumped at Knife Island. In particular, Nukewatch provided the Band’s study committee with copies of the Army Corps’ own records including tug boat logs indicating the exact dates, times, numbers, and even weights of the barrels discarded at Knife Island/River.

The documentary record of dumping at Knife Island/Knife River is well established: 206 barrels on the night of June 26, 1962 and 500 barrels September 26, 1962.

The Band didn’t respond to the letters, seemed unmoved, and its committee staff said that the ongoing recovery plan would not pursue anything at the Knife River site. One staff member suggested to Nukewatch, “The tug boat logs may not be reliable.”

Then, late last year, Red Cliff reversed its position. The Band will now seek funds to redo its lake bottom sonar survey of the Knife Island/Knife River site. Koehn said in his presentation, “The bulk of this stuff was put off Knife Island,” and the Band’s new informational materials now state, as Nukewatch and others reported earlier, that 706 of the 1,458 barrels were dumped there.

When asked by Nukewatch if the acknowledgement of the need to more thoroughly study Knife River was a reversal of the Band’s earlier position, Koehn admitted it was. The Band now believes that its sonar scan was “done too fast, about nine square miles per day, and that it will return to the area and scan at two square miles per day,” if funding can be secured, according to Koehn.

—JL

December 14, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Canada Decides to Further Review Risks of Radioactive Waste Dump on Great Lakes Shore

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

On November 27, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extended the timeline to issue a decision on the proposed Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) project by 90 days from December 2, 2015 to March 1, 2016.

The proposal by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is to construct and operate a deep underground disposal facility at the Bruce Nuclear Site, on the shore of Lake Huron on Bruce Peninsula, Ontario. The DGR would be designed to manage low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the operation of OPG-owned nuclear reactors at Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington, Ontario.

“We are deeply thankful to all the US Congress Members who urged that the decision be postponed, and the Honorable Catherine McKenna, the newly appointed Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change, for postponing the decision 90 days,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, which has helped lead US grassroots resistance to the proposal.

“We urge the delegation of 32 US Senators and Representatives to follow through with securing a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister McKenna, to communicate the concerns and objections of tens of millions of US citizens regarding the risks the DGR would inflict on the Great Lakes,” Kamps said.

“We are confident that once Environment Minister McKenna reviews the 13 years of resistance to the DUD, she can do nothing other than reject OPG’s proposal as unacceptably risky to the drinking water supply for 40 million people,” Kamps added. DUD, for Deep Underground Dump, is the opposition’s term for the proposal.

In a November 18 letter to Environment Minister McKenna, a coalition of 65 US and Canadian environmental groups, including Nukewatch, urged an extension of the December 2 decision deadline. But its overriding gist was for Minister McKenna to reject the DGR proposal outright, as it is “plagued by uncertainties, unacceptably risky, unnecessary for the management of the radioactive wastes, and unaffordable from a cost-benefit perspective.”

The coalition’s letter listed the growing opposition, including 182 resolutions passed by municipalities in the US and Canada—including Chicago, Duluth, five communities in metro Detroit, and Toronto—with a combined population of nearly 23 million people. In addition, the National Association of Counties, representing 3,069 counties across the US where 255 million people reside, recently passed a resolution opposing the DGR, as has the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus (comprised of lawmakers in eight US states and two Canadian provinces).

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has long been critical of the DGR as well.

The organization Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump has more information about the growing number of resolutions posted on its website.

—Beyond Nuclear and Nukewatch

July 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Canadian ‘Experts’ Comfy with Radioactive Pollution of Great Lakes

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

By John LaForge

The giant Canadian utility corporation Ontario Power Generation (OPG) — which operaties 20 nuclear reactors on the Great Lakes in Ontario — would save loads of cash by not having to contain, monitor and repackage above-ground storage casks for its radioactive waste. The company intends to deeply bury some of this waste next to Lake Huron, a source of drinking water for 40 million people including 24 million US residents.

OPG officially plans to let its waste canisters leak their contents, 680 meters underground, risking long-term contamination of the Great Lakes.

OPG’s formal plans and public statements make this clear.

First, the near-lake dump would be dug into deep caverns of porous limestone. The underground caverns are to “become the container,” OPG testified last fall — because its canisters are projected to be rotted-through by the waste in five years. The company wants to bury 200,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste — everything except high-level waste fuel rods — but with a wide range of radioactivity levels.

On April 13 the Canadian government was shocked to learn that OPG has grossly understated the radioactive severity of its waste material, some of which, like cesium, is 1,000 times more radioactive than OPG has officially claimed.

The Bruce reactor complex — the world’s biggest with eight reactors — is on Lake Huron’s Bruce Peninsula and is now the storage site for radioactive waste (other than fuel rods) from all of OPG’s 20 reactors. Digging its 2,000 foot deep dump on site would save the firm money — and put the hazard out of sight, out of mind.

Second, OPG’s blithe opinion about poison was broadcast in a December 2008 handout. Radioactive contamination of the drinking water would not be a problem, OPG says, because “The dose is predicted to be negligible initially and will continue to decay over time.”

The ‘expert’ group’s report predicted that it’s possible that as much as 1,000 cubic meters of radioactively contaminated water might leach from the dump every year, but calls such pollution “highly improbable.” The mathematical basis for this “prediction” of “improbability” has to be considered in view of the US government’s 650-meter-deep Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico. The WIPP dump was predicted to contain radiation for 10,000 years. It has failed disasterously, contaminating 22 workers on Feb. 14, after operating only 15 years. It may never reopen.

OPG’s pamphlet goes further in answer to its own question, “Will the [dump] contaminate the water?” The company claims, “…even if the entire waste volume were to be dissolved into Lake Huron, the corresponding drinking water dose would be a factor of 100 below the regulatory criteria initially, and decreasing with time.”

Last September, I testified against the proposal at formal hearings in Kincardine, Ontario. This unsubstantiated assertion made me ask in my testimony: “Why would the government spend $1 billion on a dump when it is safe to throw all the radioactive waste in the water?” Now, what I thought of then as a rhetorical outburst has become “expert” opinion.

Experts: radiation to be “diluted” by Great Lakes

On March 25, the “Report of the Independent Expert Group” was presented to Canada’s waste review panel. Experts Maurice Dusseault, Tom Isaacs, William Leiss and Greg Paoli concluded that the “immense” waters of the Great Lakes would dilute any radiation-bearing plumes leaching from the site.

Dusseault advises governments and teaches short courses at the University of Waterloo on oil production, petroleum geomechanics, waste disposal and sand control.

Paoli founded Risk Sciences International and the company’s web site notes his position on Expert and Advisory Committees of Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy.

Isaacs, with degrees in engineering and applied physics, works at the plutonium-spewing Lawrence Livermore National Lab, studying “challenges to the effective management of the worldwide expansion of nuclear energy.” Of course, hiding radioactive waste from public scrutiny is one of his industry’s biggest challenges.

Leiss has degrees in history, accounting and philosophy, and has taught sociology, eco-research, risk communications and health risk assessment at several Canadian universities.

So what level of expertise do the experts bring? None of them have any background in water quality, limnology, radio-biology, medicine, health physics or even radiology, hazardous nuclides, health physics, or radiation risk.

As the plume of radiation spreading across the Pacific from Fukushima continues to show, nuclear reactor disasters can contaminate entire oceans. Fish large and small and other organisms bio-accumulate the cesium, strontium (which persists for 300 years), etc., in the plume. The isotopes also bio-magnify in the food chain as blue fin and albacore tuna studies continue to show.

Canada’s expert group’s opinion on how radioactive waste might spread and be diluted in Great Lakes drinking water is inane and meaningless — its cubic meter estimates and risk assessments nothing but fairy tales. You could call the report a rhetorical outburst.

— Brennain Lloyd, Northwatch (North Bay, Ontario) email communication, Apr. 22; Toronto Star, Apr. 18, & Mar. 25, 2014

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Barrel Dump Scandal
Murky As Ever