Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015

By John LaForge

A high-level radioactive waste “parking lot” proposed for West Texas poses both terrible and unnecessary risks for people throughout the country—Texas in particular—and should not be built, according to a coalition of public interest groups that declared its opposition to the plan Feb. 9.

The proposal was announced February 6 by Waste Control Specialists (WCS), which currently operates a low-level radioactive dump at its 14,000 acre site in Andrews County, Texas, near the New Mexico border. WCS, in partnership with the French nuclear giant AREVA, plans to submit its application for accepting high-level radioactive waste to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) next year.

About 70,000 tons of such high-level waste fuel is now stored at about 70 reactor sites around the country. The waste is some of most long-lived, deadly and dangerous material known to science, radioactive for over half-a-million years. “High-level” waste specifically refers to fuel rods from the nuclear power industry and plutonium-contaminated military waste; “low-level” is actually a broad term that encompasses the rest of the radioactive waste spectrum.

If federal agencies approve its application, the private partnership could begin accepting spent fuel from the US’s operating nuclear reactors by 2020.

“It was irresponsible even to generate high-level nuclear waste without a plan for how to dispose of it,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, in a press release. “It would be doubly so to ship it across the country, with no serious plan to protect it in transit or in its new temporary destination. Hiding the problem of high-level nuclear waste in West Texas doesn’t make it go away, it makes it worse.”

Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director at Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said, “Moving nuclear waste to a supposedly temporary consolidated storage place gives the delusion of ‘a solution’ when in fact it will at least double the risks and create a de facto permanent dump near one of the largest aquifers in the country.”

D’Arrigo called the plan part of an elaborate, unnecessary shell game. “WCS is really volunteering to make the US nuclear problem worse by putting the deadliest radioactive wastes from nuclear power on the same highways, railways and waterways we all use every day,” she said. The government said 20 years ago that the waste could safely be kept at reactor sites for 100 years.

“This plan is all risk and no reward for the state of Texas,” said Tom Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas Office. “It poses transportation and accident risks around the country. We don’t need Fukushima Freeways,” he said.

Public Citizen outlined five key objections to the plan, most of which were raised by Texas’s own Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) last year:

1. Waste shipments would be targets for sabotage or blackmail by terrorists. TCEQ noted that the waste is more vulnerable to accidents or attacks while in transit than if left it where it is, because security is lighter then and fewer radiation shields would be available. Shipments from reactors around the country—passing through dozens of population centers—could last over 24 years. The Energy Department estimates that there would be about 10,700 shipments if done by rail; about 53,000 shipments (others say 100,000) if done by truck.
2. WCS would have only limited liability, while the public would be put at risk from transport accidents, leaks and terrorism.
3. So-called “short-term” storage may become permanent—an unearned trophy for the nuclear industry. The complex scientific analysis required for any permanent waste site would take about ten years and has not been done.
4. The WCS site is too close to the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water to eight states.

“The federal government has made a mess of nuclear waste policy,” said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “The highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors should be stored on-site, in hardened configurations while Washington sorts it out. Putting the deadliest nuclear waste on the roads needlessly increases risks.”

The only plausible rationale for moving high-level waste away from reactor sites has come from those warning about tsunami risks on the West Coast, and from environmental justice advocates who note that radioactive waste is often placed—as with Xcel’s Prairie Island reactors in Minnesota—near Native American communities.

Rose Gardner lives about five miles from the WCS site. “Here they go again, moving forward their dangerous ambitions,” she said. “These people at WCS haven’t even given the most affected community, Eunice, New Mexico, a chance to get used to their existing ‘low-level’ radioactive waste dump, and now they’re trying to cram a high-level nuclear waste storage site into an area next to us. These are selfish and greedy people. Andrews County may profit, but not Eunice, which will bear great risks.”

Former Texas State Rep. Lon Burnam of Fort Worth said, “The site isn’t even dry—a minimum safety prerequisite for safe storage or disposal of radioactive waste. Recently, 22 percent of test wells at the existing low-level radioactive waste site had water present. … WCS admits the Ogallala Aquifer is nearby. What would happen if radioactive waste contaminated water that lies beneath eight states?”

This is just one of many urgent questions to be answered before deciding what to do with radioactive waste.

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015

By Beyond Nuclear

Canada has closed its formal public review of a proposed “Deep Geologic Repository” (DGR), underground dump, for radioactive waste conducted by the federal Joint Review Panel, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. In a November 18 notice, the panel said it will make a recommendation to Canada’s Environment Minister by May 2015. The Minister will then make a recommendation to the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, by-passing Parliament.

The DGR is an industry-sponsored plan to save money by burying radioactive wastes next to one of its biggest reactor complexes—Bruce Nuclear Generating Station (NGS)—near the shore of Lake Huron on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, northwest of Toronto and Detroit—about 50 miles east of the tip of Michigan’s “thumb.” Bruce NGS includes nine reactors altogether, eight still operable (four reactors at Bruce A, and four at Bruce B). It is one of the largest nuclear power sites in the world.

The dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline proposal has made TransCanada Pipelines a household word, but it is not well known that TransCanada is a major shareholder in Bruce NGS. TransCanada and its partners took over operations at Bruce in 2002, after its previous operator, British Energy, went bankrupt.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) owns Bruce NGS, but TransCanada Pipelines and its partners lease and operate the reactors. Thus, TransCanada has been generating radioactive waste there for over 13 years and plans on decades of additional radioactive waste production.

OPG proposes burying all of Ontario’s so-called “low” and “intermediate” level radioactive wastes in a DGR on the Lake Huron shore at Bruce. Radioactive wastes generated by Bruce’s eight reactors, combined with additional radioactive wastes from a dozen more OPG-owned reactors east of Toronto—eight at Pickering, four at Darlington—would be buried at the DGR. TransCanada’s radioactive waste generated at Bruce would comprise a large fraction of the deadly material to be buried on the Lake Huron shore less than a mile from the water’s edge.

The proposed DGR at Bruce NGS would be for burial of so-called “low-” and “intermediate-level” radioactive wastes, originating from 20 OPG-owned reactors. There is speculation that once approved, the “low” and “intermediate” level waste DGR would simply morph into a catch-all for high-level waste. During public hearings by the Joint Review Panel attended by Nukewatch in September 2014, government witnesses testified that current legislation does not prevent high-level waste from eventually being buried in the “low-level” DGR.

The Great Lakes serve as the drinking water supply for 40 million people in eight US states, two Canadian provinces and a large number of Native North American First Nations. A leak of into the lakes, due to a transport accident, chronic dump failure, or intentional attack could be catastrophic.

Search for High-Level Waste Dump Site Also Underway

By Gordon Edwards

The Canadian government is simultaneously searching for a community to construct a deep dump site for all of the nuclear industry’s high-level radioactive waste (used nuclear reactor fuel) for permanent storage. The used fuel remains highly radiotoxic for millions of years. The waste producers—Ontario Power Generation, TransCanada Pipelines and others—want to bury and eventually abandon it in order to cut their losses, limit their liability—and get a “green light” from decision makers to extend reactor operations and indefinitely continue producing radioactive waste.

Once abandoned, the nuclear waste will no longer be their problem—but a public liability. The nuclear industry’s socialism means private profit now and public risk forevermore.

The waste generators created the Nuclear Waste Management Agency (NWMO) to carry out the site selection process. Originally there were 22 communities—3 in Saskatchewan, the rest in Ontario—that expressed interest in receiving financial compensation in order to find out more about the NWMO’s plans. Each community is given $400,000 for participating, even if it later opts out. However, the list of potential host communities is shrinking and is now down to 9 after two more areas—Creighton, Saskatchewan, and Schreiber, Ontario—were recently taken off the list. Dr. Mahrez Ben Belfadhel, Director of Geoscientific Site Evaluations at the NWMO, said March 3, “[T]here is limited potential in the areas of Creighton or Schreiber to find a site….”

Further site selection studies are ongoing near the nine Ontario communities of Blind River, Central Huron, Elliot Lake, Hornepayne, Huron-Kinloss, Ignace, Manitouwadge, South Bruce and White River.

Mike Krizanc, NWMO’s Manager of Communications, said in a statement March 3 that the agency’s purpose is to develop and implement the management and long-term “care” of Canada’s used nuclear [reactor] fuel that is “socially acceptable, technically sound, environmentally responsible and economically feasible.” It will take several more years before a site can be confirmed.

—Gordon Edwards is the President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

Take action:

Concerned readers should write or call local, state and federal lawmakers demanding they urge the Canadian government to reject the proposed dump.

On Sept. 18, 2014, US Senators Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Mark Kirk and Tammy Baldwin introduced Senate Res. 565 urging the Canada not to allow a permanent radioactive waste repository to be built in the Great Lakes Basin. The parallel in the US House is HR 716.

For details see: stopthegreatlakesnucleardump.com