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Nuclear Disarmament in Court

By John LaForge

Two major judicial decisions on nuclear weapons policy came down this autumn. On October 5 the International Court of Justice or UN World Court dismissed a suit filed by the Marshall Islands against the world’s nuclear-armed governments alleging that the eight declared nuclear weapons states and Israel are in open violation of international law by ignoring their binding legal obligation to abolish nuclear weapons. The provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) include a promise to end the arms race “at an early date” and to negotiate a treaty on “complete disarmament.”

The suit by the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI)—a nation of Pacific islands and atolls that was devastated by 67 US nuclear bomb tests—also asked the World Court to establish a timetable within which to pursue the NPT’s promised ban on nuclear weapons. The NPT applies to the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, and hundreds of nonnuclear states. Three countries with nuclear weapons that have not adopted the NPT—Israel, India, Pakistan (and North Korea which withdrew from it)—are still obliged to eliminate nuclear weapons under customary international law, according to attorneys for the RMI.

“All the nuclear weapons states are modernizing their arsenals instead of negotiating, and we want the court to rule on this,” said Phon van den Biesen, the leader of the RMI’s legal team, to the New York Times.

But the World Court’s president Ronny Abraham said the Marshal Islanders suit had not proved that an actual dispute existed between the RMI and the nuclear-armed states. The court’s judges ruled 9-to-7 to dismiss the suit. Conversely, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in California has agreed that a separate lawsuit—filed solely against the United States by the Marshallese in US federal district court—could move forward.

UN Votes to start nuclear weapons treaty ban talks

While the main thrust of the suit was thrown out by the divided court, the Republic’s demand that negotiations be scheduled for a nuclear weapons ban treaty was taken up by the General Assembly separately.

In sharp contrast to the World Court’s decision, 123 nations voted October 27 at the UN Committee for Disarmament to move forward in 2017 with negotiations to ban nuclear weapons. The global campaign for a “ban treaty” is modeled on the grass roots efforts to ban land mines (completed in 1997), and cluster munitions (banned in 2008). Treaty bans also apply to biological weapons (1972) and chemical weapons (1993).

As Alice Slater reported for The Nation, for the first time ever, China broke ranks with the nine-state nuclear terror club by voting with 16 other states—along with India and Pakistan—to abstain. North Korea, a state regularly denigrated as “unstable” and “irrational” voted Yes in support of negotiations going forward to outlaw nuclear weapons. Israel joined 38 other countries in voting against the resolution. The Netherlands also abstained, the only NATO member to break ranks with the alliance. (Five NATO states still deploy about 180 US nuclear weapons in Europe.)

The negotiations will start to move forward in March 2017, just as a 20-week-long campaign of nonviolent resistance kicks off near the Buchel Air Force Base in Germany. Buchel is an airstrip where German Tornado jets and their pilots train to deliver the remaining 20 US H-bombs still deployed there. The base has been the object of a 20-year-long anti-nuclear effort to rid Germany of the US nuclear bombs.

“A threat mostly to ourselves”

Abolitionists can take encouragement in their efforts from the number of former nuclear weapons proponents that have been converted to nuclear disarmament advocates thanks to the movement’s long-standing drumbeat. General George L. Butler, a retired commander of all US nuclear weapons at Strategic Air Command (now StratCom), broke the mold in a 1998 newspaper interview saying, “… nuclear weapons are a pernicious anachronism, and they are the greatest threat to our survival.” Anti-Soviet hard-liner and Reagan presidential adviser Paul Nitze followed suit in 1999 calling nuclear weapons “A threat mostly to ourselves.”

Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander at StratCom, chaired a blue ribbon nuclear weapons study group in 2012. Its final report declared, “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.”

Likewise, Lt. General James Kowalski, Vice Commander of StratCom, said in 2014, “The greatest threat to my force is an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.”

In his new book My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (Stanford Security Studies 2016) former Secretary of Defense William Perry echoes these warnings, declaring, “[N]uclear weapons no longer provide for our security—they now endanger it.”

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Liquid Radioactive Waste Convoys Threaten Great Lakes

“One liter of [this material] would be sufficient to ruin an entire city’s water supply.” — Dr. Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
By the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Over two dozen non-governmental organizations from Canada and the United States have asked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Barack Obama to postpone or cancel an unprecedented series of shipments of highly radioactive liquid wste from Ontario to South Carolina, shipment that are set to pass along public roads and over bridges crossing the waters of the Great Lakes.

Plans call for 100 to 150 truckloads of liquid waste over a period of several years, from Chalk River, Ontario, to the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, along secret routes with heavily armed guards. The ostensible purpose is to “repatriate” the US-origin weapons-grade uranium to prevent its use in nuclear weapons, according to a program launched by President Obama in 2009. However, the waste was never intended to be moved in liquid form.

The groups are demanding that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be developed to allow for accident impact analyses by oversight agencies and the public in both countries. The groups also insist that proper notification be disseminated through the Great Lakes Executive Committee to federal agencies, state and provincial governments, tribal and municipal governments, watershed management agencies, and local public agencies, as required under the terms of the 2012 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

“There is enough time for the governments to fulfill their duties under the Great Lakes 2012 Agreement and to respond to the demands of Sierra Club and dozens of other environmental groups to prepare and circulate an independent and meaningful Environmental Impact Statement that considers alternatives to this risky proposal,” said Christine Elwell, Green Energy Campaign, Sierra Club Canada Foundation.

A lawsuit was launched in US federal court calling for an injunction against the proposed shipments. On September 20, 2016, the US Department of Energy stated on the record of the suit that it was withholding shipments until after February 17, 2017, “in order to ensure compliance with all legal and contractual obligations”—in other words, until the federal judge has had the opportunity to rule on the merits of the lawsuit.

The liquid in question is now stored in a large doublewalled tank called FSST (Fissile Solutions Storage Tank) at Chalk River, Ontario, containing 23,000 liters (6,000 gallons) of an intensely radioactive and highly dangerous acidic solution.

FISST holds a bewildering variety of radionuclides that are created when uranium is irradiated in a reactor. The liquid also contains a quantity of weapons-grade Highly Enriched Uranium—essentially the same material as the nuclear explosive that was used in the Hiroshima bomb.

“Nuclear authorities in both countries have disguised the true nature of this liquid waste by calling it Highly Enriched Uranyl Nitrate Liquid” said Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. “In fact uranyl nitrate is only one of dozens of radioactive compounds in the liquid, and that liquid is more than 17,000 times more radioactive than the uranyl nitrate alone. Such high-level radioactive liquid has never before been transported over public roads anywhere in North America.”

There are safer, faster and cheaper ways of dealing with the waste that have already been used in Canada and elsewhere…. “There are 20 other tanks of liquid radioactive waste at Chalk River, whose contents are being solidified and stored on-site as solid waste,” said Dr. Ole Hendrickson of the Concerned Citizens of Renfrew County. “Moreover, since 2003, the liquid waste that would have previously gone into the FSST tank has been routinely solidified, and up until 2011, Chalk River Laboratories was committed to solidifying the liquid contents of the FSST tank as well.”

Tom Clements, Director of Savannah River Site Watch in South Carolina, observed that “The safest and cheapest way to address proliferation concerns is to eliminate the weapons-grade uranium at Chalk River by down-blending it, leaving only low enriched uranium, which is not nuclear-weapons-usable material. In February 2016, Indonesia was given permission to down-blend its stock of US-made liquid weapons-grade uranium, thereby eliminating any need to transport the material back to the US.

The same can be done with the Chalk River liquid waste, as was explicitly delineated by Canadian authorities in 2011. The Indonesian down-blending operation is already completed, just a few months after US Department of Energy permission was given.

The Niagara councilors are unanimously opposed to the liquid waste shipments coming through the Niagara region. Gracia Janes, from Niagara-on-the-Lake, is the Environment Coordinator of the National Council of Women of Canada. She pointed out “Our regional councilors represent close to 500,000 people. Being on the edge of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River, with the unique tender fruit lands growing the best peaches in Canada, if not North America, we are very conscious of what an accident and liquid spill would mean.”

Janet McNeill of Durham Nuclear Awareness added, “Our governments must do as the Regional Municipality of Niagara Region has done: take the time to examine all the facts very carefully, put this plan under a microscope that involves investigating alternatives, and do all that in an open process, involving the public, and not under the sole jurisdiction of the nuclear industry and its all-too-compliant regulator, so that we can trust that the risks involved and the alternatives available are being fully examined and properly investigated.” —October 3, 2016

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Another $125 Billion in Military Waste Alleged; Report Adds to Trillions Still Unaccounted For

Editorial

The Washington Post reported December 5 that, “The Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.”

News of the $125 billion in Pentagon waste and allegations of its attempted cover-up should be welcomed by President elect Trump, who said he would pay for a $500 billion increase in military spending using a “full audit” at the Pentagon, cutting redundant bureaucracy and unwanted programs. Although Mr. Trump is now waffling on campaign promises to “lock her up,” “build a wall,” “get rid of ‘Obama care,’” and “bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse,” he also promised to “eliminate waste and budget gimmicks” in the federal budget.

The Post’s report of waste and accounting fraud comes on the heels of a June 2016 military Inspector General’s report which said the Army made $2.8 billion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 billion for the year. “Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up,” Reuters reported. The Pentagon’s 2016 fiscal year budget was $573 billion—more than half of the total federal budget appropriated by Congress.

The Post notes that the newest investigation “identified ‘a clear path’ for the Department of Defense to save $125 billion over five years,” but was met with disdain by high-ranking officers. The Post reported, “Some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds.”

Saving the $125 billion could be done, the Pentagon report’s authors said, without job losses, through attrition, early retirement, and by reigning in the most high-priced military contractors, like Lockheed Martin (with $29 billion in weapons deals), United Technologies ($6.6 billion), Boeing ($15 billion), Northrup Grumman ($9.5 billion), Raytheon ($12 billion), and General Dynamics ($12 billion).

Trump’s speeches about “US military decline” will help Congress keep these giant weapons dealers well-funded, but should not fool the public. The 2017 military budget of $768 billion is four times China’s $190 billion, and 14 times Russia’s $53.02 billion; it is bigger than the nine next biggest military budgets combined.

In November 2013, a Reuters investigation found that since 1996, a staggering $8.5 trillion (with a ‘t’!) in Pentagon spending had never been accounted for. The report explained that the military regularly uses a budget gimmick of entering false and sometimes completely made-up numbers called “plugs” into ledgers in order to hide lost or missing data. In fiscal year 2012 alone, the military reported $9.22 billion in such faked “plugs.” This was up from $7.41 billion in 2011 fakery the president elect promises to root out.

This Reuters’ report on waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon came after the little-remembered admission made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10, 2001. In a shocking speech that was buried in the aftermath of 9/11, Rumsfeld said, “According to some estimates, we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions.” He decried the accounting mess as “monumental” and “terrifying.”

Sadly, the billionaires and generals appointed by Trump to oversee the treasury and the military budget cannot be expected to tear into the Pentagon’s monumental, terrifying, and unaccountable transfer of federal taxes to the shareholders of the weapons contractors. After all, they themselves are major shareholders.             —JL

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Plans for Increased Drinking Water Contamination Raise Alarm

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2016

In the summer 2016 Quarterly we reported on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed weakening of drinking water contamination standards—known as Protective Action Guides—and urged readers to send comments. Diane D’Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director at Nuclear Information & Resource Service, wrote this update on the status of the proposal.

Well over 60,000 comments were submitted to the EPA by the July 2016 deadline, nearly all of them critical and calling on the agency to:

  • Reject the water PAGs—the not-so protective Protective Action Guides—which would dramatically increase allowable radioactivity in drinking water for up to years after nuclear incidents. “Incidents” could be as routine as a radioactive release or a spill, or as devastating as a nuclear bomb or reactor meltdown;
  • Require drinking water to meet existing Safe Drinking Water Act Maximum Concentration Levels for the weeks, months or years (the intermediate phase) after radioactive contamination “incidents.”

Over 66,000 comments were submitted to EPA in total on both the 2016 proposed EPA Water Protective Action Guides (Water PAGs) and the more inclusive proposed 2013 PAGs, to which they are being added. The 2013 PAGs on all “pathways of exposure” include a 1998 PAG for food. EPA had said there was no PAG for drinking water, but a review of the agency’s Food PAG revealed that in fact, drinking water was included. So the newly proposed Water PAG would actually add even more allowable radiation exposure from water, essentially doubling the exposure from food and water!

EPA is determined to make official both the 2013 “Protective Action Guides” and their proposed 2016 Water PAGs before the next Presidential Administration is installed—possibly before the election. The agency tried back when President Bush was leaving office but missed getting them finalized then, so is trying again.

The EPA is disingenuous in its promotion of this dangerous “guidance” in several ways. Two are described here:

First, EPA strongly implies the PAGs would apply to the immediate aftermath of a huge disaster, when in fact they apply to the “intermediate” phase of any radioactive “incident” …that “warrant[s] consideration of protective action.” (Ch.1 para 1.1 of the EPA 2013 PAG; https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-06/documents/pag-manual-interim-public-comment-4-2-2013.pdf).

So the “Guides” would be preferentially used by reactor operators and others to avoid meeting the stricter Safe Drinking Water Act requirements. The new weaker PAGs would allow enormous levels of invisible but deadly radioactive contamination in drinking water for weeks, months or even years after a nuclear “incident.”

This is a deceptive way to get around meeting the Safe Drinking Water Act Maximum Contamination Levels, Superfund cleanup levels, and the EPA’s long-standing allowable risk range—giving cancer to 1-in-a-million or at worst 1-in-10,000 exposed. The PAGs protect the polluters from liability more than the public from radiation.

Second, these unconscionably high radiation doses from the Water PAGS will be added to very high internal doses from contaminated food we would be allowed to eat under the 1998 Food PAGs (www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/UCM094513.pdf) which are incorporated into the 2013 PAG.

Individuals would be allowed doses of 500 millirem/year from water plus 500 millirems/year from food and water in the intermediate phase; plus internal and external doses (2000 millirem the first year, and 500 millirem the year after) from the air we breathe and from external direct gamma rays emitted from the radioactive sources, as permitted by the 2013 PAG. (www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-06/documents/pag-manual-interim-public-comment-4-2-2013.pdf; p. 7, Table 1-1)

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Ominous-Looking Unidentified Object Found on Lake Superior Beach

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2016
By John LaForge

A local beach comber came across a startling object August 17 while walking on the Southshore of Lake Superior near Poplar, 18 miles east of Superior, Wisconsin. The deck-of-cards-sized steel object was stamped with the warning: “CAUTION – RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL” as well as the string of letters—C2O-O8-O. The metal was also stamped with a version of the standard radiation symbol which looks like a ceiling fan with wide blades. The alarmed hiker called the Douglas County Sheriff, and a deluge of official emergency responders soon descended on the small village.

When the story became public, long-time residents of the area called or emailed the Nukewatch office wondering about the Army Corps of Engineers and its dumping of corporate military wastes in the big lake in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The 9th District US Coast Guard office issued a press release from Cleveland, Ohio that noted “federal, state and local agencies worked jointly to determine the contents and source of a mysterious container found on the beach near the mouth of the Poplar River.” However, none of the eight agencies involved were able to determine either contents or the source of the strange object.

The Coast Guard’s press release said, “Initial responders from the US Coast Guard and Superior, Wisconsin, Fire Department determined the metal was not emitting any radioactivity. A follow-on investigation by the Wisconsin National Guard Civil Support Team and Wisconsin Department of Health Services ensured there was no radiation source from the surrounding area and that the object was not a hazard to the public.”

First responders swooped into the little town (pop. 603) from Green Bay and Madison, both five hours away, to examine, take custody, and ultimately dispose of the mysterious item. According to the US Coast Guard, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Wisc. Department of Health Services, the Wisc. Department of Natural Resources, the Wisc. National Guard Civil Support Team, the Superior Fire Department, the Douglas County Sheriff, and the Douglas County Emergency Management office were all involved.

The Coast Guard also said, “The object has been removed by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services for proper disposal.” The reference to “proper disposal” of harmless, nonradioactive metal was not explained.

Nukewatch asked several participants about the unusual event and the out-sized response. It was the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Unit (MSU) in Duluth that first sent a team to the Poplar River site, along with the Superior Fire Dept. Lt. Commander Jerry Butwid of the MSU, told me his office sent a team to the site because, “We were 30 minutes away” while the EPA had to travel from Green Bay. Asked if the team identified the origin of the object, Butwid said, “No. We were just the ‘eyes-on-the-scene’ and did some basic generic testing.” Butwid said the Wisconsin Department of Health Services “had jurisdiction and they took it away.”

Lt. John Mack at the Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit in Duluth said he knew of no additional photographs of the box that might aid in identifying its owner or manufacturer. “I don’t believe we took that photo,” Mack said, “maybe the fire department.”

Steven Panger, Chief of Superior Wisconsin Fire Department (SFD), told Nukewatch, “We had a few other pictures, but they’re the same,” adding, “Actually those were from the resident [who found the object]. She sent them to us.” The Coast Guard press release included one photograph of the item with the credit, “US Coast Guard photo,” perhaps done to protect the privacy of the beach walker.

The SFD produced a routine incident report of the finding that included remarks by two members of the department’s four-person Regional Chemical Assessment Team. Captain Andrew Knutson reported that while no additional markings were found on the metal, “It was however discovered that at some time the device appeared to be affixed to something and had been ripped off. The back side appeared to have been torn open revealing that the device was empty.” Sgt. Ed Bunayon of Wisconsin National Guard’s 54th Civil Support Team in Madison was also sent to Poplar. Bunayon, who said his unit “specializes in WMDs,” thought the item “looked like a cover of something like a smoke detector. But it was old, nothing like equipment we see today.”

Paul Schmidt of the Radiological Emergency Response section of the Wisc. Dept. of Health Services said his report of the event was not yet available. “We did an extensive area survey, to determine there was no radiation,” Schmidt said. Jason Hunt who led the department’s response team said Sept. 7 that the report was complete but being reviewed prior to publication. Both men said their investigations failed to determine the container’s origin.

Without access to the various departmental incident reports, no connection to the Army Corps of Engineers’ decades-long history of Lake Superior dumping could be established.

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