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October 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Environmental Groups Urge Canadian Nuclear Commission to Release Full Disaster Report

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2015

Environmental groups are urging the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to release a study on nuclear disaster scenarios that they say was suppressed.

The commission released a study last year looking at health and environmental consequences of accident scenarios, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, but the groups say it wasn’t released in full.

Greenpeace, the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and other environmental organizations say emails obtained through access to information requests show management at the nuclear commission censored the original draft.

They say the original study analyzed the impacts of a Fukushima-scale accident at the Darlington nuclear plant, [43 miles] east of Toronto, but that wasn’t included in the version released to the public.

The groups cite an email from the director of the Darlington regulatory program division that says it would become a “focal point of any license renewal,” and would be used “malevolently” in a public hearing.

The nuclear commission is holding a hearing [Aug. 19] in Ottawa on Ontario Power Generation’s application to extend the operating life of four aging Darlington reactors. The environmental groups want the Fukushima-scale analysis released before public submissions are due in September.

“The CNSC has betrayed the public trust by concealing a study revealing risks to Toronto,” said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, a senior energy analyst with Greenpeace in Toronto. “The study should be released so these hazards can be addressed transparently and appropriate emergency plans put in place.”

—Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Aug. 27; and The Canadian Press, Aug. 19, 2015

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

October 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Tell NRC: Radiation Protections Must Be  Strengthened, Not Weakened 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2015

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering a “petition for rule-making” and could decide that exposure to radiation is beneficial to health. Three individual petitioners have asked that the NRC amend its “Standards for Protection Against Radiation” and change the basis of the regulations. If adopted, the agency would drastically weaken radiation protection by embracing the scientifically dubious “hormesis” model. “Hormesis” theory suggests that “exposure of the human body to low levels of ionizing radiation is beneficial and protects the body against deleterious effects of high levels of radiation.” Current radiation standards the world over hold that radiation is always harmful.

Individual investors and nuclear utilities have advocated the debunked “hormesis” theory for decades, but this is the first time the NRC has been obliged to seriously consider it in rulemaking. The National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR VII report* explicitly dismissed the bogus theory. Committee member Herbert L. Abrams of Harvard said, “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless.” The report concluded that any exposure to radiation poses some risk, and that there is no level below which an exposure poses no risk. For the NRC to consider the petition at all flies in the face of well-established and settled science.

Please write to the NRC. Comments on the proposed rule were due Sept. 8, however, “Comments received after this date will be considered if it is practical to do so.”

To see the proposal, go to http://www.regulations.gov and search for Docket ID NRC-2015-0057.

Email comments to: Rulemaking.Comments@nrc.gov. If you do not receive an automatic email reply confirming receipt, contact: (301) 415-1677. Fax comments to: Secretary, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at (301) 415-1101. Mail comments to: Secretary, US NRC, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attn: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff.

*“Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,” BEIR VII, Phase 2, 2006

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

October 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

NSP/Xcel Accused of Falsified Weld Tests

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2015

The nuclear utility Northern States Power or NSP/Xcel Energy was accused July 27 of deliberately violating safety procedures and then falsifying reports on unfinished tests of heavy casks holding high-level radioactive waste at its Monticello reactor, 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Six large waste storage casks are known to have been inadequately tested, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors. Five of the six inadequately welded casks have already been closed up and placed in large, concrete vaults which are just outside the reactor building site on the Mississippi River. Over 450 tons of the high-level waste fuel has accumulated at the 44-year-old General Electric reactor, exactly like the three Fukushima reactors that were wrecked by meltdowns in 2011 in Japan. Contractors had been testing for cracks in welds sealing the steel casks loaded with the extremely deadly radioactive waste. While required to conduct a ten-minute test, some were cut off after only 23 seconds. One of them told NRC investigators he felt rushed because heard “management complain about employees working too slowly.” For the $12 billion company with 12,000 employees, cutting corners also involved falsifying formal reports to the NRC about the incomplete welding tests. The NRC’s findings indicate that the agency could bring criminal charges and is considering “escalating enforcement action.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 27; Counterpunch, Aug. 28, 2015

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

October 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Obama’s Clean Power Plan: Just the Beginning

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2015
By Kelly Lundeen
US electricity generation mix in 2013 (left) and with the expected impact of the Clean Power Plan in 2030 (right). The charts show the share of power generated in terawatt hours. Source: EPA. Charts by Carbon Brief.

Those least likely to confess that global climate change is a danger to survival have come out or been exposed to know of its existence. Nearly a year ago, the Pentagon admitted that global climate change is a threat to national security. In July, Exxon was found to have secretly acknowledged their own affect on climate change in 1981 in a recently discovered missive from former Exxon-Mobil scientist Lenny Bernstein. Major religions have even spoken out with the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change and the Pope’s encyclical on the environment. Amidst this heightened global concern, President Obama announced a Clean Power Plan in August. While it is too little, too late, it is better than nothing, which is what we have had until now.

What is the Clean Power Plan? 

The Clean Power Plan (CPP) was announced on August 3, 2015 as an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule, which is projected to reduce nationwide carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. To meet the nationwide goal, each state has an emissions reduction goal based on its current electricity generation mix. The state goals can be met through flexible plans that legislatures develop themselves using the Best System of Emission Reduction (BSER) created by the EPA.

The primary goal of the Clean Power Plan is to reduce carbon pollution, which will lower greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, help curb global climate change. Since the energy sector is the largest contributor to carbon dioxide pollution, it is a logical next target for the policy. However, the expected reduction in emissions from this one sector will only result in a 6-10 percent overall decrease in US emissions. This means that the US portion of global carbon emissions will decrease by an embarrassingly low 1 percent or so from its current 12 percent. (Remember that the US makes up only 4.5 percent of the world’s population.) The CPP represents a shift in climate change policy. It is an improvement because previously there was none. However, as one of the largest carbon polluters on Earth, second only to China, the US needs to lead more ambitious efforts to truncate climate change. As we approach the UN Climate Convention in Paris in December, where each nation’s action to reduce emissions is voluntary, the US example will have a large impact on other countries’ commitments.

What does this mean for nuclear energy? 

The implications that this rule will have on the nuclear power industry are spelled out in the plan’s designated “Best System of Emission Reduction” (BSER). The BSER are methods individual states can use to meet their emission reduction goals. They were based on criteria like cost of energy production, time for implementation and, of course, a reduction in CO2 emissions from current levels. Included in the BSER are renewable energy, new coal-fired plants with an expensive carbon capture and storage technology, and increased capacity for energy production from existing plants—including operating nuclear reactors. Conspicuously excluded from BSER are new nuclear reactors or natural gas plants. Existing reactors and license extensions will not be given credit toward meeting state goals. Therefore, there is no incentive for states to continue subsidizing expensive, “economically-at-risk” reactors that should be decommissioned. There are at least 13 of these around the country. Nor is there incentive for reactors under construction to continue the painstaking process of permitting another nuke.

That’s the good news about nuclear energy. It is not getting any additional government handouts under the Clean Power Plan. But the actual effects on the percentage of US energy production coming from the nuclear industry are not expected to change much from current levels. In 2030, by the EPA’s own estimates, nuclear power will continue to produce about 18.9 percent of US electricity, the same as in 2013. The good news about renewable energy is that it is expected to replace about 8 percent of the electricity currently produced by coal. General trends in energy production under the Clean Power Plan are actually expected to continue along their current paths. So there you have it: Obama’s big climate plan.

As weak as the plan is, if it weren’t for grassroots efforts, it would be much worse—or there would be no plan at all. Thanks to the decades of campaigns against the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, greenhouse gas and global warming are common household terms. Thanks to Greenpeace activists hanging from St. John’s Bridge in Portland, Oregon, Royal Dutch Shell oil drilling rigs were delayed for days in arriving at freshly melted areas of the Arctic. (Two weeks after Obama’s beautifully-articulated speech announcing the CPP, in a complete contradiction, he approved this drilling.) Thanks to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and hundreds of other groups who submitted comments to the EPA regarding the original draft of the Clean Power Plan, nuclear power generation—either existing, new, under-construction or license extended—is not considered BSER. The work of NIRS and others created a much-improved final plan.

What actually needs to be done? 

The United States could at least attempt to meet the goal stated at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which was to keep global climate warming below 2 degrees Celsius. To stay under this limit we would need to do our part in reducing emissions by at least five percent per year, every year, not six percent in 15 years as laid out in the Clean Power Plan. At the current rate, we are on track for four degrees of warming.

To be fair, the CPP has been accompanied by other actions under the Obama administration that favor earthly survival like vehicle standards for greenhouse gas emissions and methane emissions limits for the gas and oil sectors, among others. Now some minor additions are needed to make a real difference in slowing climate change, starting off with an end to billions of dollars of welfare to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, a cessation of oil and coal extraction on public lands, a tax on carbon emissions, support for public transportation, and a restructuring of the electrical grid.

Sooner than later we will need more drastic changes like ending drilling on all lands, forcing fossil fuel and nuclear polluters to pay for cleaning up the disaster they have created and shifting to 100 percent renewable energy. Several scientists and researchers have already published plans to reduce energy sector emissions to zero; see Arjun Makhijani’s 2008 book Carbon-Free and Nuclear Free, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson’s state-by-state plan to get to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 (http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-50states-renewable-energy-060815.html), or Amory Lovins’s book Reinventing Fire.

Unfortunately, the rule is a far cry from the “bold cultural revolution” the Pope has called for in his encyclical on the environment in which the “ecological debt” owed by wealthy countries is paid to the poor, or the appropriate placement of responsibility on the corporations, business and finance sectors calling on them to “shoulder the consequences of their profit-making activities” as they are called to do in the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change. Our work continues.

—Carbon Brief, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research; Democracy Now!; Beyond Nuclear, Aug. 4, 2015; Environmental Protection Agency, Aug. 3, 2015; Guardian, July 8, 2015; Department of Defense, Oct. 13, 2014

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

October 15, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

About $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for in Military Budget 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2015
By Global Research News

Yahoo Moneys’ The Daily Ticker quotes a Reuters investigation* that reveals that $8.5 trillion—that’s trillion with a “T,” give or take a few hundred million—in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 has never been accounted for.

You read that right. While Republican politicians rush to slash food stamps for some 47 million Americans living in poverty—the highest amount in nearly 20 years—former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the $565.8 billion 2012 military budget are “too steep, too deep, and too abrupt,” all while the Pentagon is overseeing billions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse.

Above is roughly what the missing $8.5 trillion dollars would look like in $100 bills. Illustration from
DailyKos.com.
[For some context, the War Resisters League reports that the Pentagon’s fiscal 2016 budget of $586.8 billion—plus the $196 billion military portion from other departments—is more than the annual military budgets of the ten next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China.]

In an interview, Linda Woodford, an employee at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS)—the Pentagon’s main accounting agency—revealed to Reuters that she spent the last 15 years of her career simply “plugging in” false numbers every month to balance the books: “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

In the real world, that would be called massive fraud.

Woodford’s involvement in the fraud doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. The report also reveals that “a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion—yes, trillion—in errors, including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009.”

“Yahoo Finance” lists additional findings, including: 

  • The Pentagon has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.
  • Over the past ten years, the Pentagon has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury, is a mystery.
  • The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.

—Global Research News, Center for Research on Globalization, June 5, 2015

*Lauren Lyster, “Want to Cut Government Waste? Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For,” The Daily Ticker, Nov. 25, 2013; Scot J. Paltrow, “Faking It: Behind the Pentagon’s Doctored Ledgers, A Running Tally of Epic Waste,” Reuters, Nov. 18, 2013

Pentagon Accounting Fraud Balloons from 2001’s Missing to $2.3 Trillion

Today’s $8.5 trillion in lost military spending is 3.6 times the $2.3 trillion said to be unaccounted for in 2001 by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In a speech given September 10 that year at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said, “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion dollars in transactions.” According to the Congressional Record Nov. 8, 2005, Rumsfeld declared that the accounting mess was “monumental” and “terrifying,” and that it would take “a period of years to sort it all out.”

  • About $900 million in corporate welfare went to Navy ship building contractors. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a scathing review of newly built ships that together cost nearly $900 million more than originally estimated, according to a report released last March by Jacqueline Leo and Brianna Ehley of The Fiscal Times.
  • Nearly $1 billion was fraudulently billed by federal contractors doing routine maintenance work on Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) airplanes. “Workers” evidently faked time cards and overcharged the government hundreds of millions of dollars—and CBP officials didn’t notice any of it, Leo and Ehley reported.
  • Last October 22, Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, released his fifth annual “Wastebook” report tearing into outrageous government spending. Spotlighting items totaling $25 billion in “waste”—Ehley reported for The Fiscal Times—Coburn skewered the Pentagon’s $1 billion program to destroy $16 billion worth of unneeded ammunition. Evidently, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation, much of the expensive ammo became “obsolete, unusable or their use is banned by international treaty.” The GAO also found that the Pentagon’s record keeping for the ammo was so poor it couldn’t determine which ammo it could still use, and now has no choice but to destroy it.

About today’s vastly increased accounting and contractor fraud, a more recent Sec. of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has said the Pentagon’s inability to be audited “is unacceptable.” However, Hagel’s attempts to enforce “audit-readiness” deadlines repeatedly failed.

Rumsfeld’s Sept. 10, 2001 warning was lost in the next day’s 9/11 events, but in 2002, CBS News interviewed retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, who commanded the Navy’s 2nd Fleet in 1976. In Adm. Shanahan’s opinion, “With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers.” —JL

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter

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