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Tritium and Cesium Contamination at Long-Closed Wisconsin Reactor

The Genoa La Crosse reactor in Wisconsin has been shut down since 1987, but is still undergoing dismantlement, a dangerous process that has caused radioactive contamination.
Summer Quarterly 2018
By John LaForge

Last February, the Genoa La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, on the Mississippi River near Genoa, Wisconsin, was found to be leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater.

The La Crosse Tribune reported March 14 that the firm LaCrosseSolutions, Inc. reported a reading of 24,200 picocuries-per-liter* in water taken from a monitoring well on Feb. 1. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows tritium in drinking water up to 20,000 picocuries-per-liter. This allowable contamination is ten times higher than what the European Union allows.

The tritium in the groundwater from La Crosse’s reactor is a danger to everyone drinking it, but the Tribune reported that the monitoring well water is “not used for human consumption.” This assurance did not come as a relief to people in the area using well water that’s not been tested. Tritium stays in the environment for 123 years, about ten of its radioactive “half-lives” of 12.3 years. This time scale gives the it a lot of time to move through the water and enter the food chain. As an emitter of beta particle radiation it isn’t a great danger outside the body, but can do damage inside the body if inhaled or ingested.

The EPA estimates that seven out of 200,000 people who drink water with 20,000 picocuries-per-liter of tritium for decades would develop cancer. However, because tumors or other cancers may not appear for decades, victims or their survivors are generally unable to be compensated.

LaCrosseSolutions is working an $85 million contract to deconstruct or “decommission” the long-shuttered and partly dismembered La Crosse boiling water reactor. The small unit was shut down in 1987, 31 years ago, after operating for 20 years. Yet it’s still poisoning the environment with radioactive leaks. Unlike other heavy industries, nuclear power’s machinery can keep on poisoning its surroundings even three decades after its profitable public service has ended.

Operating reactors release tritium from vent stacks in the form of tritiated water vapor. This can produce radioactive rainfall, “which can contaminate surface water bodies as well as groundwater,” according to Annie and Arjun Makhijani, of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. But since the La Crosse reactor has ceased operations, the tritium is no long released into the air but now its legacy is poisoned ground, contaminated and corroded pipes and duct work, and tritium leaking into the ground.

Dairyland Power Co-op, which operated the reactor from 1967 to 1987, but transferred its license to LaCrosseSolutions in 2016, isn’t alone in its contamination of groundwater. In June 2011, part two of the Associated Press’s comprehensive four-part investigation of US nuclear power, found that tritium leaks were underway at 48 of 64 US reactor sites, three-quarters of all the country’s commercial reactor operations, “often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping.”

LaCrosseSolutions’s Dirty Clean-up

In addition to the poisoning of groundwater with leaking tritium, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced on March 26 that LaCrosseSolutions had spilled 400 gallons of radioactively contaminated water directly into the Mississippi River in February 2017.

The NRC determined that the spill of waste water containing the deadly isotope cesium-137 was a violation of federal regulations—one of three low-level violations identified in its annual inspection of decommissioning being done by LacrosseSolutions—and that the cesium-137 in water samples was at concentrations exceeding federal limits. The NRC did not issue a citation but found LaCrosseSolutions had violated NRC policy.

* A picocurie is one/trillionth of a curie, or 2.2 atomic disintegration per minute. A curie is a very large amount of radioactivity, about 2.2 trillion atomic disintegrations per minute, or 37 billion disintegrations per second.

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Sea Monsters: Rudderless Reactors on the High Seas

Summer Quarterly 2018
By John LaForge

Joke: Did you hear the one about the Exxon Valdez-Fukushima-Chernobyl-Gulf-Oil-Titanic? Yeah: Russia towed a floating double reactor barge 3,000 miles in the Arctic Ocean to power off-shore oil rigs and nothing went wrong!

Announced with sarcastic headlines around the world, Russian engineers launched a giant ocean-going nuclear power barge, carrying two reactors, on a lengthy voyage over the Arctic Ocean from Russia’s far northwest to its far northeastern reaches.

Sailing from St. Petersburg April 28, the one-of-a kind Akademik Lomonosov presents such an obvious and appalling risk to sea life and seacoasts that even Newsweek magazine said in an April 30th headline, “Russia’s ‘Nuclear Titanic’ Raising Fears of ‘Chernobyl On Ice.’”

The barge has no propulsion of its own and must be tugged and towed for a year-long journey of over 3,000 miles. Its manufacturer, the Russian corporation Rosatom, said at the send-off celebration that it has built in “a great margin of safety” that is “invincible for tsunamis and natural disaster.” Chortles of “Titanic!” couldn’t be resisted since it’s been reported that when White Star Line Vice President P.A.S. Franklin was informed that Titanic was in trouble, he announced “We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable.”

The teetering, 12-story-tall Akademik Lomonosov has travelled through the Baltic Sea and the North Sea—having so far avoided collisions with icebergs, shoals, or oil tankers—and docked May 17 at the far-northernwestern city of Murmansk, where planners intend to load its two reactors with uranium fuel and conduct startup tests. The government initially intended to load and test the reactors in downtown St. Petersburg, a city of 5.3 million. But Greenpeace activists and others successfully petitioned to have the dangerous operation done far away from the metropolis. The fueling and startup will still be done close to Murmansk, a city of 300,000 in Russia’s far northwest. Greenpeace reported: “Only a petition by 12,000 St. Petersburg citizens, questions in the city’s legislative assembly, and major concerns from Baltic Sea countries about transporting two reactors filled with irradiated fuel, without its own propulsion, along their rocky coasts, caused Rosatom to use some common sense and shift loading plans to a less densely populated area.

If the fission reactor tests go as planned, the barge is to be towed some 3,000 miles through the Arctic Ocean to the far northeastern Siberian city of Pevek and go online sometime in 2019.

In what could be called a Faustian Rube Goldberg scheme, the “floating Chernobyl” is supposed to provide electric power to oil drilling platforms. The breath-taking self-destructive carbon footprint of this fossil fuel-consuming, pollution-spewing sea monster can hardly be exaggerated. The mining, milling, processing and reactor fissioning of uranium, the production of radioactive wastes that need managed isolation for a million years, all done to drill for oil which is then transformed into pollution, cannot be smarter or cheaper than conservation and efficiency that cost next to nothing and are pollution-free.

As a public relations cover, the Nuclear Titanic will also provide electricity to the city of Pevek (pop. 100,000) and to a desalination plant, replacing four small reactors called the “Bilibino” complex, which is set for decommissioning beginning in 2021.

Undersea earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane winds and rogue waves are dangerous, unpredictable and inevitable, but they are natural disasters. Placing hot, bobbing vulnerable nuclear reactors directly into a pristine wilderness like the Arctic Ocean in the face of such enormous risks is not just tempting fate, but constitutes reckless endangerment of the public commons. The Bellona Foundation in Oslo warned, using more diplomatic and understated terms, that “far-flung locations present hurdles to proper disaster response in the event of an accident.”

Most governments with nuclear stationary reactor operations understand them to be uniquely dangerous. Ordinary reactors stand alone among all the world’s potentially disastrous industrial operations in being required to have evacuation plans before powering up. But how to evacuate the oceans?

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Shunning Nuclear Weapons: Averting a Global Catastrophe

Summer Quarterly 2018
A Global Appeal by the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross
By Peter Maurer, ICRC

The International Committee of the Red Cross appeals to all States, global leaders and citizens to act on the increasing risk of the use of nuclear weapons. Whether used in a specific region or among major powers, the use of nuclear weapons would cause a catastrophic and irreparable humanitarian disaster.

If a nuclear conflict happened today, there is no international plan or capacity to respond adequately to even a limited use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the only sound course of action is prevention. We appeal for urgent efforts to ensure that nuclear weapons are never again used.

Avoiding a global nuclear catastrophe requires urgent action by all the world’s governments:

  • States possessing nuclear weapons and their allies must urgently take measures to reduce and eventually eliminate the risk of nuclear weapon use. All other members of the international community have a stake in ensuring they do so;
  • States Parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) must use the 2020 Review Conference, and its April 2018 Preparatory Committee in Geneva, to change course, away from threats of use and modernization of nuclear arsenals and towards full implementation of commitments they made in 2010 and previously to nuclear arms reductions, risk reduction and other effective nuclear disarmament measures; and
  • States should take the necessary steps to adhere to the 1972 NPT, the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and other nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation treaties to which they are not yet party and fully implement their provisions.

The ICRC makes this Appeal against the backdrop of a world in which the risk of use of nuclear weapons seems to be increasing. With previous restraints steadily falling away, and threats of use of nuclear weapons entering mainstream politics, we see a shift from a focus on non-use and elimination to making the use of nuclear weapons possible or more likely:

  • With military incidents involving nuclear States and their allies occurring with disturbing frequency, the danger of use of nuclear weapons may be greater today than during the cold war.
  • The UN Secretary General recently warned the Security Council that “The cold war is back… but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.”
  • States possessing nuclear weapons have plans for adapting nuclear weapons in ways that will make them able to be used in a wider variety of contexts. In parallel, their command and control systems have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

To be clear, the ICRC understands that all States and, in particular those engaged in conflicts in volatile areas of the world, face complex security challenges, including risks to their security and that of their allies. Regional conflicts are now intertwined with global rivalries. A multitude of protracted conflicts continue with no political solutions in sight. Yet the introduction of nuclear weapons and threats of their use only renders such conflicts more dangerous and increases the risk of a global conflagration in which much of humanity will suffer irreparably. Indeed, in some cases, the existence of nuclear weapons and the “security” benefits attributed to them are root causes of the tensions themselves.

We also recognize that in the last two decades, significant steps have been taken to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons from Cold War levels. Yet reductions alone do not reduce the risk of their use in light of the facts and dangers mentioned above. Concerted steps towards reducing nuclear risks are therefore urgently needed. Nuclear weapon States and those allied to them bear particular responsibility. Such measures are well known and include:

  • Unequivocal commitments never to use nuclear weapons first [only China, India and North Korea have done so];
  • Removal of nuclear weapons from “hair trigger” alert status;
  • Pre-notification of military exercises that may involve the launch of missiles or other vehicles associated with nuclear weapons;
  • Re-establishment of joint early-warning centers to clarify in real-time unexpected and potentially destabilizing events; and
  • Steps to progressively reduce the role of nuclear weapons in security policies.

This Appeal is rooted in what the ICRC knows through its own experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 73 years ago and that of Japanese Red Cross hospitals which, even today, continue to provide treatment for many thousands of survivors of the US atomic bombings. From this experience, and from what has been learned through engagement with environmental experts, the United Nations and other organizations, it is clear that:

  • The catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons use cannot be limited in time and space, and that more victims will die in the months and years following their use than at the moment of the blast through radiation poisoning, cancers and other diseases;
  • There is still today no international capacity or plan for humanitarian assistance to respond adequately to the use of nuclear weapons; and
  • Even the use of just a hundred nuclear weapons, which represents a fraction of existing arsenals, against urban targets could lead to [mass smoke from vast firestorms causing] a cooling of global temperatures, shortening of growing seasons, food shortages in large parts of the world, and the deaths of over a billion people.

This Appeal by the ICRC also reflects the urgent concerns of the entire International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, including 191 National Societies and millions of volunteers around the world. Just last November, the Movement expressed its deep alarm at the increasing risk that nuclear weapons may be used and stressed “that any risk of use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable given their catastrophic consequences.” Together we adopted an ambitious four-year Action Plan to ensure nuclear weapons are never again used and are eliminated.

Three years ago in my statement on nuclear weapons to the Geneva diplomatic corps ahead of the 2015 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, I concluded: “We know now more than ever before that the risks are too high, the dangers too real. It is time for States, and all those in a position to influence them, to act with urgency and determination to bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.”

Too often, the international community has been unable to prevent foreseeable crises. This time it is imperative that we prevent impending nuclear catastrophe. Seldom has collective action to reduce nuclear weapon risks and move towards their elimination been more urgent. —April 23, 2018

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World’s Biggest Submarine Base Targeted by Plowshares Action

The Kings Bay Plowshares participants from left: Clare Grady, Patrick O’Neill, Elizabeth McAlister, Fr. Steve Kelly SJ, Martha Hennessy, Mark Colville, and Carmen Trotta.
Summer Quarterly 2018

Adapted from The Nuclear Resister

Seven Catholic plowshares activists entered Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia on April 4th, 2018. They said in a statement that went “to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to ‘beat swords into plowshares.’” Once on the base, the activists used crime scene tape, hammers and hung banners reading: “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide —Dr. Martin Luther King,” and “Nuclear weapons: illegal/ immoral.”

The seven acted on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who devoted his life to addressing what he called the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.” Another of their banners reworked Dr. King’s “ultimate logic” declaration, applying it to nuclear weapons saying “The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide.”

Kings Bay Naval base is the Navy’s Atlantic Ocean Trident submarine port. In southeastern Georgia, 38 miles from Jacksonville, Florida, Kings Bay is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. The site maintains six giant Trident long-range, nuclear missile submarines (each two football fields long), and two guided missile subs.

The group also carried a written indictment of the nuclear weapons base accusing the US government with crimes against peace.

Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to symbolically convert weapons of mass destruction. They hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day by wasting scarce resources desperately needed to address hunger, disease, and homelessness.

The action statement added that nuclear weapons kill before being detonated “through our mining, production, testing, storage, and dumping, primarily on Indigenous Native land.” The statement quoted Dr. King, who said in his Beyond Vietnam speech, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.”

The seven activists are Elizabeth McAlister, 78, of Jonah House, Baltimore; Fr. Steve Kelly SJ, 69, of the Bay Area, California; Martha Hennessy, 62, and Carmen Trotta, 55, both of the New York Catholic Worker; Clare Grady, 59, of the Ithaca Catholic Worker; Mark Colville, 55, of the New Haven, Conn. Catholic Worker; and Patrick O’Neill, 61, of the Garner, North Carolina Catholic Worker.

The seven were charged in federal court with felony Conspiracy, Destruction of Property on a Naval Station, Depredation of Government Property, and Trespass. The Kings Bay protest is the latest in the long series of 100 previous Plowshares actions. The Plowshares disarmament movement began in 1980 with “The Plowshares Eight” who entered a General Electric nuclear warhead factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Patrick O’Neill, Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessy were released on bond to house arrest on May 24, 2018. The four others can be sent only plain, white pre-stamped postcards that can be purchased at a post office, using only blue or black ink, at: Clare Grady #015632; Elizabeth McAlister #015633; Stephen Kelly #015634; Mark Colville #015635,

Glynn County Detention Center
100 Sulphur Springs Road
Brunswick, GA 31520

—For updates see: <kingsbayplowshares7.org> or <nukeresister.org>

 

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Rad Waste’s “Gaseous Ignition” & “Exothermal Events” are Explosions

Some of the 177 tanks holding 56 million gallons of liquid high-level radioactive wastes at the Hanford Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington state. At least 77 of the tanks are leaking. Over a period of 40 years, nine Hanford reactors along with chemical “reprocessing” to get plutonium for weapons, produced billions of gallons of such waste. At least 450 billion gallons were dumped on land or injected into deep wells. Clean up operations could last 100 years were estimated in 1988 to cost $175 billion. Energy Dept. photo.

Summer Quarterly 2018
By John LaForge

Last April’s explosive news from the folks who bring us safe, effective, reliable nuclear power and weapons, was that at least four barrels of military radioactive waste blew apart somewhere inside Idaho National Laboratory (INL) property, near Idaho Falls. INL officials said the “ruptured” or “breached” barrels contained a sludge of unidentified fluids and solvents from the long-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium weapons site near Denver. INL officials said they were trying to determine which radioactive materials are in the sludge.

The April 11th accident was reported by ABC News, the Associated Press, the Seattle Times, the Japan Times, Industrial Equipment News, and Fox Radio among others. Laboratory spokespersons at first said a single 55-gallon drum holding radioactive sludge “ruptured.” Energy Department (DOE) spokesperson Danielle Miller wrote April 12 that, “Later, there were indications that a second and possibly a third drum may have been involved.” On April 25 Erik Simpson, a spokesman for DOE contractor Fluor Idaho, announced that in fact four barrels had burst. Simpson said the “ruptures” were heard outside the building where they took place, but he didn’t call them explosions.

The DOE’s Miller called the prompt deconstruction of the waste barrels an “exothermal event”—a pseudonym for “bomb” that means “a chemical reaction accompanied by a burst of heat.” The phrase harkens back to the official gibberish used to describe an explosion of hydrogen gas in a loaded high-level radioactive waste cask at Wisconsin’s Point Beach reactor site in May 1996. The cask contained 14 tons of highly radioactive used reactor fuel, and the explosion (a word strenuously avoided by industry PR folks) lifted the cask’s 4,000-pound lid and left it askew. Point Beach operators called it a “gaseous ignition event.”

One theory about the cause of the bursting waste drums is that “radioactive decay made the barrel[s] heat up and ignite particles of uranium,” the AP reported April 12. Unfortunately for the first responders, “When the firefighters left the building, emergency workers detected a small amount of radioactive material on their skin.” The very next sentence in this AP story has the DOE’s Miller saying, “None of the radioactive material was detected outside of the building where the rupture[s] occurred.”

Because of what officials said was “decades of secretive record-keeping,” INL officials do not “know the exact contents,” of the barrels, Joint Information Center spokesman Don Miley reportedly said. Neither DOE nor INL described what got on the firefighters’ skin.

Rad Waste Explosions “Actually Happening”

Miley told the press, “They haven’t run into anything like this actually happening”—but exploding rad waste has been around a long time.

It happened on Valentine’s Day 2014, at the US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. A barrel of military plutonium waste exploded underground, contaminating the entire facility, including the elevator and ventilator shafts, and even poisoned 22 workers internally because they inhaled plutonium-laced dust.

More recently, on October 18, 2015, a fire and explosions spurred by rainfall hurled 11 buried barrels of radioactive chemical waste from a trench into the air and spewed debris like a geyser 60 feet high at a “US Ecology” site near Beatty, Nevada. This shocking fire in one of 22 shallow trenches of radioactive waste couldn’t be put out with water hoses because water started it in the first place. Authorities had to close US Highway 95, cancel school, and await more explosions while they let the fire burn itself out. US Ecology had its records seized by Nevada’s Radiation Control Program, which has never disclosed what sorts of radioactive materials were burned in exploded Trench 14—although the dump site is known to hold a total of 47 pounds of plutonium and uranium isotopes.

In September 1957 at Kyshtym in Russia, a tank holding 70 million metric tons of highly radioactive waste exploded and produced a massive plume that contaminated 250,000 people across 410 square miles.

High-level radioactive waste always comes with the risk of explosions, and the danger helped move the Obama Administration in 2010 to cancel plans to use Yucca Mountain, Nevada, northwest of Las Vegas, for the burial of 80,000 tons from commercial US reactors. Physicists Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri at the Los Alamos National Laboratory warned in 1995 that at the Yucca site the material could erupt in a catastrophic explosion after steel containers dissolve. Bob Halstead, Director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office, has called the Yucca project, “an exercise in planning for a nuclear catastrophe that is fundamentally rhetorical. It’s theatrical security because the preparations that are being made by the Department of Energy have no real chance of succeeding. They satisfy the public…because they’re a symbol of control….This waste is going to be deadly for tens of millions of years….”

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