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Fukushima Wastewater & Cleanup Costs Pile Up

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
By John LaForge

At Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan, the triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami and three reactor meltdowns have caused the deaths of 15,899 people and left 2,529 unaccounted for, mostly in the three hardest-hit prefectures, according to the National Police Agency.

The ferociously radioactive melted fuels that burned into the hard foundations of the three reactors are also extremely hot thermally and must be continually cooled with water which is poured into the wreckage.

This cooling water also becomes highly radioactive after coming in contact with the molten reactor fuel and so is being collected in large, hastily built tanks on the coastal reactor site. Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, has collected nearly 1.2 million metric tonnes (2,204.6 pounds) of contaminated water in about 1,000 tanks. The collected waste water also includes rain and groundwater that runs across the melted cores after pouring through earthquake-caused cracks in reactor foundations.

Tepco says it will run out of space for more tanks in two years, and is lobbying vigorously to win permission to dump the waste water into the Pacific Ocean.

South Korea, the fishing community and other near Pacific neighbors have raised strenuous objections to any such dumping, especially after Tepco admitted it lied about its water filtration system which turns out had not removed dangerous cesium, strontium and other radionuclides from the water.

Nevertheless, Japan’s government, the International Atomic Energy Agency and industry lobbyists appear willing to reject public opinion and the concerns of allies in order to save Tepco from financial collapse. Last January 31 a panel of experts picked by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry recommended that the pollution be piped into the Pacific Ocean.

In March this year Tokyo Electric Power Co. estimated that 1.37 trillion yen ($12.9 billion) will be needed over 12 years to remove the melted reactor fuel just from units 2 and 3.

The wrecked fuel in unit 1 presents such a vexing complex of problems that the firm didn’t venture a guess at its removal cost.

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Limited Cleanup Resumes at California’s Sacred Santa Susana

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
By Kelly Lundeen

After seven years of stagnation, a partial cleanup at Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), 30 miles from Los Angeles, has resumed. Boeing, NASA, and the Department of Energy (DOE) are working under a cleanup agreement with the State of California, with a one-time completion date of 2017. NASA Inspector General’s Office admitted it would cost half a billion dollars and was “not achievable.”

The infamous 2,850-acre testing site for experimental nuclear reactors had the first meltdown in the US in 1959, causing the fourth largest release of radioactive iodine-131 in history. Up to 1,800 cases of cancer may have been caused by the accident, according to a Santa Susana Field Lab Advisory Panel study released in 2006. The US National Park Service (NPS) is now considering the site’s eligibility for recognition on the National Registry of Historic Places.  If approved, cleanup requirements already agreed to could be waived.

The current cleanup efforts prioritize the buildings said to pose the greatest risk of erosion from severe storms and re-suspension of radioactive particles from wildfires. On July 21, demolition began in the DOE’s portion of the SSFL removing 4,123 cubic yards of low-level radioactive waste and about 67 cubic yards of mixed and low-level radioactive waste. Ten buildings are expected to be demolished and transported to as yet unnamed low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities.

Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, says the cleanup activities only scratch the surface. “Removing parts of these ten buildings will eliminate only about 0.001% of the contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the vast majority of which is in the soil.” Boeing hasn’t returned to cleanup since 2013. The NASA currently has plans to resume demolition in 2021.

Potentially challenging the future of the cleanup is a pending NASA application on behalf of the Chumash, Gabrieleño and Fernandeño tribes for the entire SSFL site to be designated a Native American cultural site in the list of National Register of Historic Places.

Within a small section of the NASA-owned property lies the 25-acre Burro Flats Painted Cave with its historic Indigenous paintings, already listed on the National Register. Over 100 cultural sites including at least ten caves with pictographs dating back 5,000 years were recently revealed during a survey of the SSFL, leaving little doubt that the site qualifies for designation as an Historic Place. Alan Salazar, a Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians Council Elder spoke at a July 28 meeting of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors. “We’re in favor of Burro Flats being designated as a cultural district. But we also want this site cleaned up. … That whole site is sacred to us,” he said.

Yet many are skeptical of the timing of the designation. Area resident Melissa Bumstead, whose young daughter twice survived leukemia that Bumstead blames on the SSFL told the Simi Valley Acorn, “There is no reason this nomination couldn’t wait until after the cleanup was complete.”

Exceptions to the 2010 NASA cleanup agreement include “Native American artifacts that are formally recognized as Cultural Resources [aka Historic Places].” Those exceptions are subject to oversight by the State of California, not the tribe. The nomination will now undergo final review before the US National Park Service.

 — EM News Flash; and Southwest Research and Information Center, July 22, 2020

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Forest Fires Are Setting Chernobyl’s Radiation Free

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
Quotations excerpted from the report by Jane Braxton in the The Atlantic’s Aug. 10, 2020 edition.

In the 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactors in Ukraine…

“… wildfires … have grown larger and more frequent. Each fire releases radionuclides, just as [Vasyl Yoschenko, a Ukrainian radio-ecologist] and his colleagues documented…. But none has incinerated the landscape at the scale of the fires that burned this past April. They were far larger than any since the 1986 disaster, burning for weeks and scorching nearly 165,600 acres.…[See Summer 2020 Nukewatch Quarterly, p. 6]

“Monitors in Norway, 2,000 miles away, detected increased levels of cesium in the atmosphere. Kyiv was smothered in smoke. Press reports estimated that the level of radiation near the fires was 16 times higher than normal, but we may never know how much was actually released: Yoschenko, [Sergiy] Zibtsev [a forestry professor at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine], and others impatient to take on-the-ground measurements were confined to their homes by the coronavirus pandemic.…

“When Chernobyl’s trees burn, they send their stored radionuclides aloft as inhalable aerosols. Instead of blasting from a single source, as it did in 1986, the contamination now comes from the trees that cover some 660 square miles around the nuclear power plant.… If Chernobyl forests burn, contaminants will migrate outside the immediate area,” says Zibtsev. “We know that.”

[Beginning in 1993, Zibtsev] “spent the next five summers collecting soil and vegetation samples that were later analyzed for traces of radionuclides. The radiation he found there was higher than it had been in the period immediately following the explosions, a surprising observation until Yoschenko’s 2003 experimental burn explained it: Fires had burned 12,500 acres in 1992….

“In 2015, a rash of fires in Chernobyl brought international attention to their dangers. From April to August 37,066 acres burned within the exclusion zone…. “April’s fires … scorched 23 percent of the exclusion zone… nearly four and a half times the size of fires in 2015….”

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Moody’s Says Climate Crisis Threatens Nuclear Reactors

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020

According to an August 18 report by Moody’s Investors Service, “over half” of US nuclear reactor generating capacity “face growing credit risks” in the next 10 to 20 years due to flooding, hurricanes, heat stress and other predicted impacts of climate change.

“The consequences of climate change can affect every aspect … from fuel handling and power and steam generation to maintenance, safety systems and waste processing,” the report said.

The highest risk or “red flag” category includes reactor sites that are “highly exposed to historical and/or projected risks,” Moody’s said. The report gives five nuclear stations the red flag because of potential floods. Another 13 reactor sites got redflags for heat stress. The threat of windstorms, sea-level rise, and water stress each put one reactor complex in the red flag category, because “proximity of power plants to large bodies of water leaves them vulnerable to flooding, hurricanes, and storm surges, which increases the risk of damage,” Moody’s said.

The simultaneous risks of earthquakes and tsunamis, such as devastated Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan in 2011, were not assessed in the report.

—Beyond Nuclear; and S&P Global, Aug. 18, 2020

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Huge Cost Overruns May Defeat Small Reactor Prototype as Investors Flee

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020

With projected costs leaping from a 2017 estimate of $3.6 billion, to $4.2 billion in Nov. 2019, and reaching $6.1 billion last July, municipal investment in a Utah scheme to build the nation’s first so-called small modular reactors (SMRs) is starting to dry up.

To date, Logan, Utah and Lehi City have quit the project, and Bountiful, Utah’s power department says the chances are greater than 50-50 that it too will withdraw.

“[I]f we can’t bring this power in at a competitive price we just won’t build this project,” said LaVarr Webb, a spokesperson for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), Reuters reported. UAMPS is the Utah state agency that delivers electricity to member cities in six western states. Webb told the Washington Examiner he expected other members could decide to leave too.

The experimental reactor venture is being built at the Idaho National Laboratory. UAMPS is partnered with dozens of regional cities, the companies NuScale, Fluor, and Worldwide Construction, and the US Dept. of Energy. The plan is to build the first of 12 small modular reactors by 2029. Cities including Brigham City, Hyrum, Logan and Lehi joined the effort to subsidize some of the development costs for the first SMR, which is being engineered to produce 60 megawatts.

A major financial shock was the Energy Department reneging on its promise to provide $1.4 billion for the first reactor, the Cache Valley Daily reported. Then in early August, the Utah Taxpayer’s Association issued a scathing report urging all the municipalities to quit the project citing cost overruns, construction delays, and “dependence on unpredictable federal subsidies.”

Edwin Lyman, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Nuclear Power Safety, told Reuters, “the only hope for the UAMPS project, or any other of these first-of-a-kind projects, is that the Department of Energy will end up financing it.”

—JL

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