Nuclear Power – Page 69

June 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell.

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

May 17, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Whack-a-Mole Brings Canadian Rad Waste to the US

Confronting radioactive waste seems like a Whack-a-Mole game. The nuclear industry pops up with a new dumping or dispersal scheme just when the opposition slows or halts the last one.

After millions of citizens pushed Canada’s Environment Minister to question and delay plans for an underground radiation dump right next to Lake Huron (this fight is not over yet), the Canadian companies UniTech and PermaFix now make news with plans to ship radioactive waste from Canada to the United States. UniTech wants to truck ten-thousand tons of it across the border using five different border crossings.

Ten-thousand tons is a lot of material; one equivalent is a Navy Heavy Cruiser which is two football fields long, four stories high, and 60 feet wide. Cut up into trailer-sized chunks, think of thousands of truckloads of dirty bombs moving throughout the country around lakes and rivers, through cities and towns, and over bridges for years and years. Can you say Homeland Security?

Both UniTech and PermaFix have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licenses to “export” and “import” thousands of truckloads of “radioactive-contaminated tools, metals and other solid materials.” The vagueness of the applications, with nondescript references to “tools,” “metals,” “other solid materials,” and the curious mention of “incremental amounts of special nuclear material”– is only partly cleared up by a list of 48 different radio-isotopes that will contaminate the “materials.”

These so-called “low-level” wastes are not benign. The allowed “special” materials will include plutonium, strontium, cobalt-60, americium, and neptunium, which are some of the deadliest and most long-lasting poisons on Earth and the worst to come from nuclear power. These and the other 43 identified poisons give off radioactive alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays — or some combination — to one degree or another. It’s this “radiation” that makes the waste deadly, because exposure or inhaling or ingesting it can cause heart disease, immune system dysfunction, cancers and leukemias. The effects are cumulative too, so adding more radiation to the exposures we’ve already had shortens our lives even more.

UniTech has already won an NRC “export” license allowing it to ship wastes into the US. (The plan to ship some of it back across the border to Canada is still being contested with the NRC and may end up in court.) Some of UniTech’s waste will be trucked to waste-handling factories in Tennessee, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for “processing.” The bulk of the waste is coming from Canadian nuclear reactors and laboratories.

Shuffle board, bumper cars, demolition derby: pick a metaphor

The proposed US “processing” is, according to UniTech’s license, for: “…segregation, survey, decontamination, unrestricted release, beneficial reuse.” Kay Cumbow, Secretary of the Great Lakes Environmental Alliance, warns that “unrestricted release” means the waste can be dumped in ordinary municipal landfills, and “beneficial reuse” means that contaminated metals can be used in regular smelters like ordinary recycling and ultimately used in consumer products like jungle gyms, frypans, nails and silverware.

This gigantic shell game warrants deeper investigation because waste resulting from the processing and declared “un-usuable” is to be shipped back into Canada, adding another lengthy round of handling and transport risks.

If all this sounds absolutely cray-cray, you may be a precautionary or a prudent person. Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says that the processing can be done in Canada, so there is no need for the program at all. There must be a substantial financial interest involved in order to voluntarily compound the United States’ own waste containment dilemmas by adding thousands of additional risks.

Pierre Sadik, of US Public Interest Research Group has pointed out that the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry try to create the impression that the transport of radioactive waste has been entirely safe. But this is bunk. A 1996 report by the State of Nevada documented 72 rad waste transport accidents in the US over 50 years.

Sadik reported that four accidents involved radioactive material contamination beyond the vehicle; four involved contamination confined to the vehicle; 13 involved traffic accidents with no release or contamination; 49 involved accidental container surface contamination. The waste’s radiation can escape through container leaks, poor shielding, or during truck crashes or fires,

Thanks to the unsung effort of watchdogs like Diane D’Arrigo and May Olson of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, US citizens have successfully rejected previous attempts to deregulate rad waste and allow it into the scrap metal business. Federal attempts to declare some radioactive waste “below regulatory concern” have repeatedly been halted as completely unacceptable. But the Whack-a-Mole game won’t let up. –– John LaForge

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch 3 Comments

Chernobyl’s Fallout Spread to “Wherever it rains in the United States”

“Liquidators” getting ready with lead aprons to climb onto the roof of Chernobyl reactor No. 4 after the initial explosions and fire. (RIA Novosti) Half-a-million military conscripts were ordered to work in severely radioactive areas. Ukrainian Health Minister Andrei Serdyuk estimated in 1995 that Chernobyl’s death toll was 125,000 from illnesses traced to radiation exposure.

Commercial Media Forgets Chernobyl Spread Radioactive Fallout Across Hemisphere, and “Wherever it rains in the United States”

By John LaForge, 25 April 2017

Commercial media recollections of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe almost always minimize its global impact. A New York Times editorial last Dec. described the April 26 explosions and fires as “a volcano of deadly radioactivity that reached Poland and Scandinavia.” This picture is both factually true and grossly understated — because Chernobyl’s carcinogenic fallout went far beyond northern Europe and all around the world — a fact that is easy to verify.

For example, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) concluded in 2011 that the disaster “Resulted in radioactive material becoming widely dispersed and deposited … throughout the northern hemisphere.” Then, hammering the lesson home like a drill sergeant, UNSCEAR’s report (“Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident”) repeats the phrase “throughout the northern hemisphere” at least five times on pages 310, 311, 315, 316, and 343. Chernobyl’s hemispheric contamination was well known long before the UNSCEAR review, noted in hundreds of books, journals and scientific papers. The March 30, 2005 Oxford Journals reported, “The releases of radioactive materials were such that contamination of the ground was found to some extent in every country in the Northern Hemisphere.” An Environmental History of the World (2002) by Donald Hughes says, “There were measurable amounts throughout the Northern Hemisphere.”

Yet trivialization is the mainstream media rule, especially after three simultaneous reactor melt-downs at Fukushima-Daiichi have contaminated the whole of the Pacific Ocean. On April 23, Abu Dhabi’s “The National” said about Chernobyl: “Half a million ‘liquidators,’ mostly military reservists from all over the Soviet Union, tried to clean up the affected area.” This is flatly untrue, because no one decontaminated the entire Northern hemisphere. Soviet conscripts worked only the region knows as the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl reactor No. 4 in Pripyat, Ukraine.

Understatements rewrite history, deceptively misinform

Understatements were the rule in the 1990s. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, on April 27, 1998, described “a deadly cloud of radiation across large sections of Russia and Europe.” ¶ The Appleton, Wisc. Post Crescent, April 26, 1998, said, “Ukraine and parts of Russia were hard hit.” ¶ The New York Times, on April 23, 1998, depicted the disaster as “a poisonous radioactive cloud north of Kiev.” ¶ The Los Angeles Times, on April 27, 1995, limited the fallout to “a radioactive cloud across Ukraine, Russia and parts of Europe.” ¶ A June 1, 1998, Associated Press story restricted the “deadly cloud of radiation” to “large sections of Russia and Europe.”

The website GlobalVoices.org reported this April 19: “Chernobyl… caused radioactive material to be spewed into the atmosphere, exposing hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe to extremely high doses of radiation.” In fact, half of Chernobyl’s total fallout was spewed far beyond the three hardest-hit states, going to every corner of the hemisphere.

Of course it misinforms the public to ignore the fact that reactor disasters have poisoned the whole earth, but why?

One reason is that downplaying the severity of Chernobyl — and Fukushima-Daiichi as well — sugar-coats the threat posed today and every day by operating power reactors beyond their original license limits, or near earthquake faults, volcanic regions, or tsunami zones. The hidden agenda behind the profit-driven media’s deliberate belittling of reactor accidents — and the dangers of radiation — is to protect significant advertising revenue. Big utilities, big pharma, big mining, big universities, and big weapons labs makes billions of dollars from increasing the “background” level of radiation. Official background exposure was 170 millirems per-year for decades; 18 months after Chernobyl it doubled to 360 mR/yr; and it nearly doubled again a few years ago to 620 mR/yr.) “Nuclearists” intend to keep it this way, even if it means buying pricey ads claiming that reactors are safe and small radiation doses are harmless.

Chernobyl Doused the Whole Hemisphere

Early on in Chernobyl reporting, it was common for the Associated Press and others to broadcast its global impact using plain language. On May 14, 1986, AP noted, “An invisible cloud of radioactivity… has worked its way gradually around the world.” On Oct. 9, 1988, it said flatly, “Chernobyl … spewed radiation worldwide.” And it reported in the Duluth Herald, May 15, 1986: “Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States, the EPA said.” This warning should never stop being flabbergasting, and should have been the death knell for nuclear power.

The Duluth News-Tribune & Herald reported May 22, 1986: “For the second time since the [Chernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said.” Western officials were precautionary. The AP reported May 15, 1986 that “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.”

Again, author Donald Hughes notes, “For example, an increase of [radiation in rainwater] recorded on May 12 in Washington State was more than 140 times the background level measured immediately before the Chernobyl cloud reached the USA.”

Today, remember to read corporate minimization of Chernobyl’s effects with a radioactive grain of salt.

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Strike Two” Against Canadian Radioactive Waste Dumpsite Proposal

By John LaForge, 18 April 2017

Nuclear power supporters like to say, “Nuclear waste disposal is a political, not a scientific problem.” Scientists refute this slogan every day.

A case in point is the Canadian Environment Minister’s second “do over” order issued to Ontario Power Generation regarding the company’s waste dump idea. The 15-page order, issued April 5, rejected the company’s sophomoric answers to a previous “not good enough” finding by Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna.

OPG wants to bury 7 million cubic feet of radioactive waste in a deep hole less than a mile from Lake Huron, on its own property on the Bruce Peninsula, northwest of Toronto. It’s there that OPG runs the world’s biggest rad’ waste production complex — the Bruce Nuclear Station — eight old power reactors in varying states of repair and disrepair.

The company proposes digging 2,231 feet down into part of its 2,300-acre compound on Lake Huron, and burying all sorts of radioactive material (everything except waste fuel rods), including a “significant amount” of carbon-14, a cancer agent with a deadly radioactive “life” of 57,300 years — i.e. ten 5,730-year radioactive half-lives. After two years of public hearings into the question of placing long-lasting poisons next to a major source of drinking water, a federal Joint Review Panel in 2015 recommended approval of the project to Minister McKenna.

McKenna was to make a decision by March 1, 2016, but instead demanded better work from OPG. On Feb. 18, 2016, the Minister ordered the company to produce details about alternate dump sites. OPG submitted shockingly shabby generalizations Dec. 28, 2016, and McKenna’s April 5 reply is an understated denunciation of OPG’s obfuscations and evasions. Beverly Fernandez, founder of Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, told Clinton, Michigan’s The Voice, “OPG has been given a failing grade on its most recent report regarding burying its radioactive nuclear waste less than a mile from the Great Lakes. OPG has now been issued a strong set of new challenges to answer.”

For example, the company has the nerve to that, “All underground facilities (office, tunnel, emplacement room) will be constructed in accordance with the seismic requirements of the latest edition of the National Building Code at the time of the construction.” In fact, as the Minister’s rejection of OPG’s attempted snow-job pointed out, “There are no specific seismic requirements in the National Building Code for underground facilities…. Provide a revised version…”

A public servant doing her job

In requiring a study of alternate potential sites for deep disposal, Minister McKenna ordered OPG to make “specific reference to actual locations.” Instead, OPG tried to get away with citing two enormous geological regions that it said might be suitable. As Jennifer Wells and Matthew Cole reported in the Toronto Star , OPG’s “actual locations” covered an area of 726,052-square-kilometres — about 75% of the Province of Ontario. This blatant attempt at scamming the government didn’t fool McKenna, a public servant who is actually doing her job.

In one of OPG’s more garish displays of environmental racism, the company’s Dec. 2016 report failed to analyze or even acknowledge the land use Treaty Rights of Indigenous or First Nation peoples. Minister McKenna’s April 5 rebuke rightly demands that OPG provide “a description of the land and resource uses for the alternative locations that highlight the unique characteristics of these locations from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.

McKenna’s lengthy critique amounts to “strike two” against OPG, and the Minister’s refutation was praised by community leaders and watchdogs around the Great Lakes. So far, 187 cities, townships, counties, states and provinces in the Great Lakes Basin have passed resolutions opposing the dump — including Duluth, Minn. Columnist Jim Bloch in The Voice asked, “How many swings will the Canadian government give Ontario Power Generation before the firm strikes out in its request to build a nuclear waste dump on the shores of Lake Huron?” The answer may be “no more.”

As befits questions of persistent cancer agents and how to package and keep them out of drinking water for thousands of years, McKenna’s April 5 rebuke lists 23 complex and technically dumbfounding dilemmas that could doom the Lake Huron dump plan. Professor Erika Simpson at the University of Western Ontario reviewed McKenna’s critique and wrote April 7, “It will take OPG perhaps a decade to come up with all the information that is now required … given all the overwhelming problems identified.”

Beverly Fernandez summed up the opposition as well as anyone. “Given the overwhelming opposition to this plan and the potential for massive consequences to the Great Lakes, no responsible government would approve a plan that endangers the drinking water of 40 million people, and a $6 trillion Great Lakes economy.”

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power Bums, Bailouts and Bankruptcy

By John LaForge, 11 April 2017

You have to hand it to the nuclear industry for socializing costs and privatizing profits. Last year, lobbyists for operators of dirty, deadbeat old reactors won massive public subsidies — bailouts — in New York and Illinois that will keep decrepit, retirement-age reactors from shutting down.

Instead of turning off the rattle traps — and investing public funds in renewables – state-sponsored electric ratepayer handouts in the two states will total $10 billion over 12 years. Remember Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens”? These utilities are welfare gods, propping up decrepit reactors by buying entire state legislatures that in turn legalize monthly electric bill increases.

In New York, the FitzPatrick reactor (Entergy Corp) and Nine Mile Point station (Exelon Corp) join the Ginna reactor in foisting rate hikes on customers, giveaways that will keep the failed reactors spewing “allowable” radioactive emissions to the air and water indefinitely.

Tim Knauss, reporting for the Syracuse Post-Standard wrote, “The once money-losing nuclear plants are now expected to add millions to the profits of parent company Exelon Corp.” The windfall for the dividend-earning class is considerable. A single large power reactor can draw $1 million in profit every month for the owners and shareholders.

In Illinois, the Clinton and Quad Cities reactors will be saved from the axe by a similar bailout engineered by Exelon Corp last December. Like clockwork, Exelon told it investors in February that “cash flow and profit outlook have improved thanks to the New York nuclear subsidies and a similar program adopted in Illinois,” Knauss reported. Dave Kraft, director of Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, explained the downside in an email: “Mortgaging our energy future by bailing out the energy past deliberately stifles the real energy and climate solutions we need: more energy efficiency, and aggressive use of renewables. The utilities that rationalize ‘bailout’ have no real concern for either climate change relief or consumers’ pocketbooks — only their own corporate bottom line. Legislators who think otherwise are either naïve and ignorant or bought-and-paid-for — or both.”

It gets worse. According to Prof. Karl Grossman, the nuclear “industry hopes that if New York succeeds, it could pressure other states to adopt similar subsides.” One Reuters headline was: “New York could show the way to rescue US nuclear plants.” Case in point: in Ohio Apr. 26, Sen. John Eklund (R) put up Senate Bill 128 which, if enacted, will add a hefty tax to electric bills and bail out FirstEnergy, saving its otherwise bankrupt Davis-Besse and Perry reactors from closure. Ohio citizens’ groups and others are fighting this corporate welfare. AARP Ohio said the give-away would raise electric bills “almost $60 a year for up to 16 years — a real burden for people on fixed incomes.” The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, the American Petroleum Institute-Ohio, the Alliance for Energy Choice, and the Electric Power Supply Association all argue that the bill only pads FirstEnergy’s bank account while other states –including Wisconsin, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Nebraska — have opted to let insolvent reactors close for good.

To postpone nuclear power’s inevitable demise, the failed industry needs to take the subsidies nationwide, according to Tim Judson, Director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in Maryland. Judson warned April 4 that, “The price would be outrageous. If reactor subsidies go nationwide, it could cost $130-$280 billion by 2030.” Bailout legislation for dilapidated reactors is now pending: in Connecticut, for Millstone 2 & 3; in New Jersey, for Salem 1 & 2 and Hope Creek; in Texas, for South Texas 1 & 2 and Comanche Peak 1 & 2; in Maryland, for Calvert Cliffs 1 & 2; and for nine reactors in Pennsylvania including Beaver Valley 1 & 2, Three Mile Island 1, Susquehanna 1 & 2, Limerick 1 & 2, and Peach Bottom 2 & 3.

Buddy Can You Spare a Billion Dollars?

At the other end of current nuclear biz, reactor construction delays and cost overruns have now bankrupted Toshiba’s Westinghouse Electric. Westinghouse, as the New York Times said, is “a once-proud name that, in years past, symbolized … supremacy in nuclear power.” That was then; before David Shipley, writing for Bloomberg, reported that the March 29 “bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric Co. is yet more evidence, if anyone needed any, that the economics of nuclear power are not good… nuclear energy can’t compete against cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.”

Toshiba/Westinghouse has lost over $6 billion trying to build four new reactors in the United States, two in Georgia and two in South Carolina, which may now be abandoned. The Vogtle project in Waynesboro, Georgia was first projected to cost $14 billion: no bargain at all considering the plummeting cost of solar, and wind, and the “negawatts” produced by conservation and efficiency. Now three years behind schedule and with Westinghouse buried under a mountain of law suits, one utility expert testified the actual cost will be over $21 billion. “Too cheap to meter” was always too pricey to fathom. On March 30, Toshiba said Westinghouse had total debt of $9.8 billion.

As Judson at NIRS says, “It’s imperative that environmental, consumer, and clean energy advocates get active — both to stop these bailouts from coming to more states and to make sure [Trump] doesn’t rubber-stamp a massive national reactor bailout, like state utility commissions did in the 1990s. … We can’t afford to let that happen again.”

Chernobyl’s Fallout Spread to “Wherever it rains in the United States”

“Strike Two” Against Canadian Radioactive Waste Dumpsite Proposal

Nuclear Power Bums, Bailouts and Bankruptcy

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