Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

  • Issues
    • Direct Action
    • Environmental Justice
    • Nuclear Power
      • Chernobyl
      • Fukushima
    • Nuclear Weapons
    • On The Bright Side
    • Radiation Exposure
    • Radioactive Waste
    • Renewable Energy
    • Uranium Mining
    • US Bombs Out of Germany
  • Quarterly Newsletter
    • Quarterly Newsletter
    • Newsletter Archives
  • Resources
    • Nuclear Heartland Book
    • Fact Sheets
    • Reports, Studies & Publications
      • The New Nuclear Weapons: $1.74 Trillion for H-bomb Profiteers and Fake Cleanups
      • Nuclear Power: Dead In the Water It Poisoned
      • Thorium Fuel’s Advantages as Mythical as Thor
      • Greenpeace on Fukushima 2016
      • Drinking Water at Risk: Toxic Military Wastes Haunt Lake Superior
    • Nukewatch in the News
    • Links
    • Videos
  • About
    • About Nukewatch
    • Contact Us
  • Get Involved
    • Action Alerts!
    • Calendar
    • Workshops
  • Donate

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Minnesota’s Monticello Reactor is Leaking Radioactive Tritium — Like Most in US

By John LaForge

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was notified of a “nonemergency” at the 51-year-old Monticello reactor on the Mississippi River in Minnesota — one of the oldest in the United States and a General Electric unit identical to the three meltdown-destroyed reactors at Fukushima. On Nov. 22, owner Xcel Energy informed the NRC of “an on-site monitoring well that indicated tritium activity above the [Offsite Dose Calculation Manual] … reporting levels.” Translation: Groundwater from a well on company grounds is poisoned with radioactive tritium above permitted levels. The short NRC notice then says “The source of the tritium is under investigation,” although no mention is made of the extent of groundwater contamination, or whether off-site wells have been tested. Without data from groundwater beyond the site’s boundaries, the NRC notice then reaches the unsubstantiated, upbeat conclusion that “there was no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel.” Xcel’s claim recalls the great undersea explorer Jacque Cousteau who said: “A common denominator, in every single nuclear accident — a nuclear [reactor] or on a nuclear submarine — is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, ‘There’s no danger to the public.’ They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt.”

Photo Credit: NRC.gov

— Notification of Environmental Report, NRC Region 3, Nov. 22, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Inseparable Link Between Military and Civilian Reactors

By Mari Inoue

President Emmanuel Macron of France once said that “without civil nuclear power, there is no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civil nuclear power.” This article will examine some common features of military and civilian nuclear programs including their histories, technologies, and regulatory bodies.

Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project that designed and produced the first atomic bomb also produced the first modern nuclear reactor, the B reactor. Located at the Hanford Reservation in eastern Washington State, it produced plutonium for the first nuclear testing at Trinity site in New Mexico as well as for the atomic bomb used in Nagasaki in 1945 that ended more than 70,000 lives and destroyed the health of an additional 70,000+ people. The first modern nuclear reactor was developed to create nuclear weapons to kill civilians in war.

AEC: Successor of the Manhattan Project

Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which took over the Manhattan Project’s sprawling scientific and industrial complex. The AEC focused on designing and producing nuclear weapons, conducting weapons testing in Nevada and the Pacific, and developing reactors for naval propulsion. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave the AEC authority to regulate the commercial nuclear power industry while simultaneously promoting nuclear energy. The AEC was disbanded in 1974 and replaced with the Energy Research and Development Administration, for reactor R&D, naval reactors, and nuclear weapons programs, and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to regulate commercial power reactors and other uses of nuclear materials.

The Department of Energy

Since 1977, the Department of Energy oversees both the nation’s nuclear weapons program and its energy system. The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is composed of a nationwide complex of government-owned, contractor-operated national security laboratories, and nuclear weapons production facilities. Together with the Pentagon, the DOE assesses the safety of its nuclear weapons stockpile. The DOE is also responsible for the environmental “cleanup” of nuclear weapons complexes, including Hanford, which is perhaps the most radioactive and hazardous place in the United States.

Navy

The US nuclear energy enterprise supports the nuclear navy, as the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, jointly operated by the DOE and the US Navy, which provides naval nuclear reactors fueled by weapons-grade highly enriched uranium. Under the new “AUKUS” deal, the US and UK will transfer naval nuclear propulsion technology and nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Japan

Japan has 47 metric tons of separated plutonium (enough to make 6,000 nuclear weapons according to the Arms Control Association), and is one of the five countries that possess most of the global non-military stockpile of “excess” plutonium — along with the US, UK, Russia, and France. This plutonium is a weapons proliferation threat and a target of nuclear terrorism because it could be used to develop thousands of nuclear warheads. Separating plutonium from used nuclear reactor fuel — from commercial reactors — is formally allowed under the 1988 US-
Japan “123 agreement.”

A flight test body for a B61-12 nuclear weapon. (Photo Credit: Jerry Redfern Copyright: ©2015/Jerry Redfern)
Nuclear Posture Review

The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of 2018 explicitly stated that ensuring “the necessary reactor capacity to produce an adequate supply of tritium to meet military requirements” is one of the initiatives that the US will pursue “to ensure the necessary capability, capacity, and responsiveness of the nuclear weapons infrastructure, and the needed skills of the nuclear enterprise workforce.”

The Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR also notes that “modernizing tritium production will assure a reliable and resilient domestic source and options for longer stockpile life tritium components.” It also states: “Meeting our nuclear policy goals would not be possible without a capable, motivated workforce. The military and civilian personnel who work every day in the nuclear enterprise are a national asset whose accomplishments are rarely seen but vitally important.”

Nuclear Energy Institute

The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group that promotes nuclear power, is explicit about the links between reactors and weapons. Its website says the United States’ nuclear-powered navy (the world’s largest) is supported by the commercial nuclear energy industry and its shared nuclear supply chain; nuclear reactors and fuel facilities are a critical part of the US infrastructure, and they bolster the mission of the US Navy, other areas of the Pentagon and the DOE; and advanced reactors will also play a role in the national defense of the future.

The US commercial nuclear power program compliments its nuclear weapons enterprise. Consequently, supporting nuclear energy is to support nuclear weapons. To achieve the total elimination of nuclear weapons, we need to halt commercial production of tritium and the commercial use of highly enriched uranium and plutonium by shutting down operating reactors and halting the construction of new reactors.

— Mari Inoue is a lawyer and activist based in New York City and a co-founder of Manhattan Project for a Nuclear-Free World (mp-nuclear-free.com).

Editor’s note: The Tennessee Valley Authority — owned by the US Government — announced plans to continue violating the separation of civilian and military nuclear programs by increasing tritium production for nuclear weapons in the two Watts Bar civilian reactors, Savannah River Watch reports. The tritium rods irradiated in TVA reactors are processed at the DOE’s Savannah River Site, where the tritium goes into nuclear weapons. This is more proof that Biden’s Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm will continue to violate nuclear non-proliferation norms by using civilian nuclear facilities for production of nuclear weapons materials.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The US Nuclear Industry: Older, but Not Wiser

By Kelly Lundeen

The 2022 annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report placed the US third for the oldest reactor fleet. The US’s 92 operating reactors have an average age of 41.2 years, longer than the 40-year licenses for which they were originally permitted. The US comes in behind Switzerland (43.6 years), a nation with four reactors, and Belgium (42.3 years) with seven.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02032010/undoing-mothballs-long-abandoned-nuclear-reactors-eyed-restart/

Why so old? Prior to Watts Bar Unit 2 going online in 2016, the US had not begun operating a new reactor since 1996. As society has come to understand that nuclear energy, previously coined ‘atoms for peace,’ is not so peaceful — with accidents, lethally radioactive waste, and cancer clusters around reactor sites — opposition to the energy source has intensified. Problems have bogged down the industry from delays in licensing, enormous construction cost overruns, and simple economics. Investors need assurances that nuclear power can rely on government and ratepayer handouts to be solvent. As politicians are beholden to their large nuclear industry donors, bailouts allow the old reactors to renew licenses beyond a lifespan of ‘safe’ operation.
— Forbes, Oct. 22; World Nuclear Industry Status Report, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Canadians Resisting High-Level Waste Dump

Deep Geological Repository. Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
By Lindsay Potter

After 10 years, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) still seeks a “willing” host for the latest planned deep geological repository (DGR), a vault designed to hold over 5.5 million used reactor fuel bundles 2,200 feet below ground for thousands of years. Though there are no DGRs operating currently, the first has been constructed in Finland and potential sites are being surveyed in Switzerland. The NWMO is dangling “job creation” and short-term economic stimulus as boons of the $24 billion project, but environmental groups, concerned residents, and activists decry the threat to watersheds and local health.

The argument over the DGR’s viability is déjà vu for opponents of the similar Ontario Power Generation project, which sought approval for 16 years before scrapping plans in June 2020, capitulating to scientists, community and political leaders, and an overwhelming dissenting vote by the Saugeen Ojibway First Nation.

The newly proposed DGR site in the South Bruce community of 6,000 sits below 1,500 acres of farmland, 25 miles from Lake Huron and 30 miles inland from the Bruce Nuclear Station, where radioactive waste is currently stored in aboveground casks on the lake’s shore. Ignace, the other potential host, is a town of 1,200 in northwestern Ontario roughly 150 miles from Lake Superior on Indigenous treaty land.
The South Bruce community is divided between those against the DGR, largely lead by the group Protect our Waters (POW), and those in the self-titled “willing-to-listen” camp who tow the NWMO’s line that radioactive waste is safe and skeptics are fear-mongers. The latter want to delay a decision in order to learn more about the DGR, contradicting the more than 1,700 signatories to POW’s petition demanding a 2022 referendum. The campaign to persuade local residents features speakers selected by the NWMO who overwhelmingly find DGR and nuclear to be safe “best-practices.” Despite October’s local election of a slate of relatively pro-DGR candidates, including mayor Mark Goetz, there is bi-partisan support for holding a binding community referendum on the question. However, many Canadians and experts stipulate that leaving the decision up to a single provincial township puts tens of millions who rely on the lake for drinking water and southern Ontario for agricultural products at risk without consent, not to mention fails to consider the dangers posed by moving this waste across Canada to its chosen resting spot.

Indigenous activist and author Tanya Talaga describes Ignace-area tribal chiefs’ “vehement opposition” to hosting the DGR on the traditional territories of Treaty 9, Treaty 3, and the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850, on land near the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, in an area also home to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) which represents 49 First Nations in northern Ontario close to the Arctic Watershed. “The NWMO appears to consider ‘agreement’ … to mean a decision made by the few while ignoring the many,” Talaga writes, confirming a “complete lack of consent” among NAN leaders. NAN Grand Chief Derek Fox said “if I have to be the one there, getting hauled away to jail … I will be there to make sure this waste does not enter into our territory.” The NAN chiefs collectively agreed their nations will resort to any means necessary and intend to protest and take legal action. A DGR in Ignace would violate Article 29 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canadian Parliamentarians adopted in 2021, though Ontario refuses to enact matching provincial legislation.

For now, the Canadian nuclear industry seems determined to park its accumulated radioactive waste on the shores of the Great Lakes without regard for redundancies. It is hard to imagine how advocates of nuclear energy can consider this clean or green when the global failure to determine a safe way to store the constantly accumulating waste continues to prove unresolved.

— Bayshore Broadcasting, Oct. 24; London Free Press, Oct. 23; Midwestern Newspapers, Oct. 19; CTV News, Oct. 8; Globe and Mail, Aug. 11, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

January 22, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Military Plutonium Waste: Government Eyes More Poisons, Increased Storage, and Extended License at New Mexico Dump

Drums of waste in WIPP’s deep Panel 7, site of the 2014 barrel explosion, sealed on Oct. 22, 2022. (Carlsbad Current-Argus, Oct. 25, 2022)
By Lindsay Potter

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), in Carlsbad, New Mexico, opened in 1999 as the only long-term storage facility designed to entomb radioactive nuclear weapons waste for 10,000 years in ancient salt bed caverns excavated 2,000 feet below ground. However, in February 2014, an improperly packed drum self-heated to 1,600 degrees and exploded, spewing uranium, plutonium, and americium throughout 30,000 cubic meters and into the ventilation shaft, which failed to contain the poison air. The calamity caused a three-year shutdown, left at least 22 workers internally exposed to plutonium radiation, and potentially exposed another 140 people working on the surface. The lack of oversight cost tax-payers $2 billion in clean-up and another $73 million in fines the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) levied on the Department of Energy (DOE) — though the money went to improve infrastructure in and around WIPP rather than to local constituents affected by the release. Nuclear Waste Partners (NWP), the DOE’s contractor running the site, was docked a mere $1 million off its multi-million dollar annual incentive, paid by the federal government above the cost of operating the site. WIPP receives shipments of transuranic waste from 22 locations around the country, mostly plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools, and equipment from Cold-war era weapons production. However, the DOE is considering expanding WIPP’s capacity, operations, and timeline to include storage of private commercial nuclear wastes and surplus plutonium.

WIPP’s re-opening was plagued with mishaps — including releases of contaminated air, roof collapses, and dozens of permit violations — but resulted in no penalties. Regardless, the EPA deemed WIPP compliant in July 2017, and the DOE promised a $2 million reopening bonus, dangling another $2.1 million for meeting performance milestones. The facility resumed full operations in 2021. In October, Panel 7, a radioactively contaminated work space sitting open since 2014, was filled and sealed with a 100-foot thick layer of salt sandwiched between two steel bulkheads. In November, workers loaded the first barrels, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, into Panel 8, the final-permitted panel.

Poor Performance, Perpetual Problems

Despite precedent, on February 26, 2021, improperly packed pyrophoric materials caused a waste drum to spark and, throughout 2022, WIPP faced a slew of further accidents, failures to comply, and unanticipated shutdowns, rendering the number of received shipments nearly fifty percent short of productivity goals.

In August, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was forced to stop shipments to WIPP for two months while the NMED investigated issues at the waste handling bay, including several containers from INL with radioactive surface substances or elevated internal radioactivity, some of which were sent back to Idaho.

Multiple unplanned maintenance issues stalled work, including a September shutdown to assess the waste hoist’s brake pads. However, while the hoist was not operating, NWP changed specifications for the equipment, and work resumed days later.

On October 10, WIPP’s air monitors tripped. Tests found radon on air filters from radium-226, released by decaying uranium, likely from gas vented from containers as waste breaks down. Radon gas is the greatest cause of lung cancer among non-smokers according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Two months earlier, on August 9, NMED logged a shipment from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) missing vent filters necessary to contain particulate matter.

Sixty More Years of Waste Production

The DOE applied to renew its 10-year permit with requests to add two new panels and remove WIPP’s 2024 closure date, leaving its operational timeline open-ended. While the NMED reviews the application, Santa Fe locals are pushing back against a new plan to bury surplus plutonium at WIPP. The proposal would send plutonium across the country, some 1,500 miles each way, from LANL to the Savannah River Site to be diluted and then back for burial at WIPP.

Yet the DOE digs deeper to find further sources of waste for WIPP’s coffers. The Government Accountability Office reported on September 29 that WIPP is the “preferred alternative” dumping ground for “greater than Class C (GTCC)” waste — “commercial low-level nuclear waste from decommissioned reactors or unused medical or industrial equipment” (Carlsbad Current-Argus). Projections through 2083 estimate the DOE will accumulate 12,000 cubic meters of this and other “GTCC-like” wastes, neither of which has a current legal pathway for disposal. The DOE may “assume responsibility” for radioactive waste generated by private companies and use taxpayer money to bury it deep in the salt caverns, so the commercial nuclear industry can continue to rake in profits without concern for how to handle its legacy of contamination. Ultimately, the DOE is awaiting approval by Congress as federal law may not allow government custody of the waste.

These new projects could drive WIPP operations indefinitely, with the facility presently under half its statutory 6.2 million cubic foot capacity. However, the nine new storage panels needed to hold this quantity would require additional permitting by the NMED.

— Associated Press, Nov. 26; Carlsbad Current-Argus, Nov. 2, Oct. 25, Oct. 24, Oct. 14, and Oct. 13, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 62
  • Next Page »

Stay Connected

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Subscribe

Donate

Facebook

Categories

  • B61 Bombs in Europe
  • Chernobyl
  • Counterfeit Reactor Parts
  • Depleted Uranium
  • Direct Action
  • Environment
  • Environmental Justice
  • Fukushima
  • Lake Superior Barrels
  • Military Spending
  • Newsletter Archives
  • North Korea
  • Nuclear Power
  • Nuclear Weapons
  • Office News
  • On The Bright Side
  • Photo Gallery
  • Quarterly Newsletter
  • Radiation Exposure
  • Radioactive Waste
  • Renewable Energy
  • Sulfide Mining
  • Through the Prism of Nonviolence
  • Uncategorized
  • Uranium Mining
  • US Bombs Out of Germany
  • War
  • Weekly Column

Contact Us

(715) 472-4185
nukewatch1@lakeland.ws

Address:
740A Round Lake Road
Luck, Wisconsin 54853
USA

Donate To Nukewatch

News & Information on Nuclear Weapons,
Power, Waste & Nonviolent Resistance

Stay Connected

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

© 2023 · Nukewatch