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June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S./German Radioactive Waste Importation on Hold

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Bob Mayberry

The U.S. and Germany have agreed to export highly radioactive waste fuel from the Jülich Research Center in Germany to the U.S. Energy Department’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in Aiken, South Carolina. Critics note that the transfer would appear to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has been put on hold.

According to the watchdog group SRS Watch, the Jülicher Nuclear Waste Management Company (JEN), located near the German-Dutch border, has large quantities of radioactive graphite pebbles that fueled Germany’s now defunct gas-cooled reactors. SRS originally agreed to import and process, and ultimately dump the German waste fuel at the SRS — and perhaps elsewhere in the U.S. However, objections raised by SRS Watch, and by German colleagues opposed to the export, resulted in new agreements between the SRS and JEN to commercialize the processing of irradiated graphite fuel, which includes both low- and highly enriched uranium.

H-Canyon reprocessing plant at SRS, July 30, 2015, ©High Flyer

These agreements also stand in violation of the nuclear weapons non-proliferation policies under the 1970 NPT, which requires the production of risk assessments before any processing of waste fuel. Tom Clements, a director of SRS Watch who first brought the secret deal to light, reports that any shipping of Germany’s waste reactor fuel would also be illegal under German law.

The DOE has refused to prepare such assessments, claiming that the graphite fuel poses no weapons proliferation risk.

According to Reuters, Germany agreed in 2014 to pay $10 million to the U.S. to outsource the waste fuel to SRS. But former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley threatened to fine the DOE up to $100 million a year for the delay in cleaning up the site’s colossal Cold War radioactive waste problems.

Consequently, the U.S.-German agreement has been delayed, and the parties have shifted their focus to commercializing the processing of the waste. However, techniques for removing highly enriched uranium from this aged and highly radioactive “pebble bed” experimental fuel have still not been developed.

–  SRS Watch, April 11, 2022;  Newswires, 21 February 2020; Reuters, 28 July 2014

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

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Renewable Energy Output Surges Ahead of Nuclear

Nuclear-Free Future, photocredit: Sierra Club
Nukewatch Quarterly 
Summer 2022
By Lindsay Potter

In 2021 domestic renewable energy — wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal — outproduced nuclear power for the second year running, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) found. Clean sources were responsible for 795 million megawatt-hours (MWh), 21% of energy production, while nuclear totaled 778 million MWh, or 20%. Solar Industry Mag reported April 26, 2022, that wind, the largest producer of renewable energy in the U.S., increased outputs by 12% in 2021 (14% in 2020), and utility-scale solar produced 28% more in 2021 (26% in 2020). The EIA predicts an additional 10% hike in renewable production for 2022. Globally, hydro-electric together with solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal produce more than twice as much energy (24.2%) as nuclear (10.3%), according to world-nuclear.org.

The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021 (WNISR) found that nuclear power production fell by more than 100 terawatt-hours (TWh), the greatest drop aside from the standstill following the Fukushima disaster. Although hydro-electric steadily outproduced nuclear over the last 30 years, other renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biomass have now globally surpassed nuclear. Proof possible: for the first time this year, hydro, wind, and solar together generated more than all fossil fuels in the European Union — though France still relies on nuclear for 71% of its energy.

Competitive clean energy casts shade on the need for nuclear, as the industry flounders to innovate expedient and economic technology. Given the minimum of 10-15 years needed to bring new Small Modular Reactors online, trials in Argentina, China, and Russia have been unimpressive. Furthermore, WNISR announced “net capacity addition” fell for nuclear to 0.4 gigawatts (GW) and rose by more than 250 GW in the renewable sector last year, leading the report to conclude “nuclear is irrelevant in today’s electricity capacity newbuild market.” The WNISR also cites cost, health effects, climate change effects, the global impact of COVID-19, and “bribery, corruption, and counterfeiting” in the nuclear industry as additional evidence that nuclear power is dying.

By 2050, the EIA predicts that wind and solar technologies will become as affordable as natural gas, as nuclear and coal continue to fall out of use. To make way for clean energy Congress must severe ties with dying industries, promote carbon fees and sunset credits, shut down pipelines and drilling leases, and halt initiatives to develop new poisoned nuclear theories or bailouts that keep dangerous reactors running past their licensed closure dates.

Solar Industry Mag, Apr 26, 2022; World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021; Deutsche Welle, Sept 28, 2021; EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nukewatch Welcomes Lindsay Potter

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
Lindsay Potter carrying 14-month-old Riley this past winter on the Plowshares Land Trust, home to Nukewatch.

We are happy to welcome Lindsay Potter to the Nukewatch staff! Our part-time IT support and writer Christine Manwiller had to step back because of growing responsibilities at her full-time job. Lindsay is a writer, farmer, activist, and a full-time mother. After completing two BA’s, in Poetry and Journalism, Lindsay has spent several years farming and now dedicates her time to getting back to the land, caring for family, and participating in community grassroots organizing for social, racial, and environmental/climate justice. Most recently Lindsay focused on two projects: working in Osceola, Wisconsin to protect the groundwater and the St. Croix River from harmful frac sand mining practices at the North 40 Mine, particularly as a member of the Town Board Committee drafting a new ordinance limiting and regulating the mine; and working with Amery (WI) United, a community group dedicated to racial justice organizing, that planned monthly rallies throughout the summer of 2020 and now focuses on building awareness of racism in rural Wisconsin by hosting diverse educational speakers, working with local school boards to address discussions and curricula around race, and creating events encouraging celebration and centering of Black American culture.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Office News, Quarterly Newsletter

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Congress Approves Two- year Extension of Radiation Exposure Compensation Act

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
photocredit: US Department of Justice
By John LaForge

Both the House and U.S. Senate have approved a two-year extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act or RECA, a federal law that compensates some of the U.S. residents who were exposed to radiation during the Cold War.

The act was implemented in 1990, but expires in July unless the extension is signed into law by President Biden. The extension is intended to provide time to craft a larger expansion of the program that could last until 2040.

The law allows one-time payouts for downwinders, uranium miners, uranium mill and transport workers who can establish that they were exposed to radiation from weapons detonations or the workplace.
Congress is considering a separate bill that would broaden the geographic area covered by the act, for example adding New Mexicans to the list of downwinders, including uranium workers contaminated after 1971, and raising the compensation cap to at least $200,000.

Many downwinders and uranium workers are Native Americans and suffer from cancers and other long-term health problems. Navajo Nation leaders are among those urging Congress to expand RECA.

— AP, May 14; KNAU, Arizona Public Radio, May 5; and Carlsbad Current-Argus, May 5, 2022

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Can Nuclear Power Be the Answer?

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Alfred Meyer

What are the consequences of using nuclear power to address climate change? Is nuclear power clean energy? Can it deliver reduction in greenhouse gases soon enough to help minimize climate chaos, with ‘soon enough’ defined as 10 years or less by the 2022 International Panel on Climate Change? Lastly, what part does the nuclear power industry play in enabling our nuclear navy and nuclear weapons?

The consequences of operating nuclear reactors include:

• Carbon dioxide (CO2), radioactive [1] and toxic emissions at each step in the nuclear fuel chain, the vast industrial infrastructure, parts of which are in almost every state in the U.S.;
• Regular, planned releases of radioactivity into the air and water;
• Thermal pollution of the surface water which provides the vast amounts of water needed to cool waste fuel and fissioning uranium fuel rods in the core;
• Accidents, leaks and unplanned, unregulated releases of radioactive gases, liquids and solids into the biosphere;
• Many forms of radioactive wastes, some of which remain toxic for millions of years, all while we don’t know how to safely store them for the next 100 years, much less for millions of years; and
• Providing the academic, industrial and governmental infrastructures which are, according to former Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, fundamental enablers of our nuclear navy and nuclear weapons [2], contributing some $42.4 billion per year for these purposes.[3]

This is a formidable list of significant consequences. Given these impacts, nuclear power is clearly not a clean source of electricity, even though fissioning uranium, in and of itself, does not emit large amounts of CO2. The CO2 which nuclear power does put into the environment is hazardously radioactive.

Nuclear reactors produce many other toxic and deadly emissions, as well as nuclear waste. We don’t know the full effects of ionizing radiation on living things and our planetary ecology, but what we do know is that in humans it can cause cancer and diseases of the pulmonary, cardiac and immune systems.

In one sense, the worldwide nuclear enterprise has put all of us into a non-consensual, unplanned, unmanaged and out-of-control human experiment which involves irradiating our biosphere. Due in part to research about the radioactive strontium-90 from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests found in kids’ teeth around 1960, President John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 in an effort to reduce our exposure to radioactivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences, all exposure to ionizing radiation increases health risks, which are cumulative over our lifetimes.[4]

While one could argue based on these consequences alone that nuclear power should be stopped rather than promoted, let us consider if nuclear power can really be a part of the solution to climate change. Climate change, like nuclear weapons, poses existential threats to life on earth, so if nuclear power can play an essential part in mitigating climate change, then maybe accepting the above known and unknown detriments of nuclear power is just part of the price of survival. A steep price for sure, in environmental, health, financing, and nuclear weapons dangers, but no price is too high if it is the only path to survival, right?

Do we have to accept nuclear power’s clearly evident risks to avert climate chaos?

To avert climate chaos we have 10 years or less to significantly reduce CO2. While some of the 93 operating reactors in the U.S. are eligible for $6 billion of taxpayer subsidies to help them survive economically, the aging facilities are becoming increasingly dangerous and expensive to operate. Most of the cheerleading for new nuclear power, encouraged by $2.5 billion of new government funding, focuses on small modular reactors (SMRs), sodium-cooled reactors, generation IV reactors, and even micro reactors.

In theory, this is an impressive lineup of technology’s cutting edge. In fact, it is largely new packages for old ideas, existing on paper only. It will take decades of research & development, prototype testing, creation of industrial capacity, and the unit-by-unit construction before new nuclear reactors can be operational. But, we don’t have that much time; we need truly clean energy that we can install now at a reasonable price with minimal harmful environmental effects to be on-line in less than 10 years! New nuclear can’t meet the time line.

If nuclear is as bad as all that, why do we have it?

If nuclear power is so fundamentally dirty, dangerous and expensive — with a growing waste problem that we haven’t yet solved — and new nuclear cannot deliver in time, if at all, why is nuclear power such a prevalent hope for so many, including some anti-nuclear weapons activists who think we need it to address climate change? Remembering that the public is saddled with the risks of these endeavors — environmental, medical, and financial — while private corporations take the profit, why does anyone believe that nuclear power is worth so many of our dollars?

The short answer is “Atoms for Peace,” the U.S. government’s program announced at the UN by President Eisenhower in 1953. He introduced the peaceful uranium-235 atom, as an antidote to that war-making U-235 that incinerated Hiroshima and horrified the world.

Atoms for Peace put a smiley face on the nuclear enterprise, drawing attention away from military weapons and their massive destruction, and instead directing attention to the promises of unlimited benefits. This program proliferated nuclear technology to over 40 nations around the world, including Iran, and was based on the aspirational atom that we would “tame” to “serve” us, with electricity “too cheap to meter” — along with atomic cars, boats, ships and rockets — truly a phantasmagorical and mythical cultural promise, which does not exist in reality.

Certainly nuclear weapons are the most potent instruments of destruction in the world. As illustrated by the Manhattan Project begun in 1942, nuclear weapons depend upon an extensive scientific/industrial/academic/governmental infrastructure. Ernest Moniz, mentioned above, has clearly illustrated how much our nuclear military depends on the civilian nuclear power infrastructure, calling it “an essential enabler of national security.” The Atlantic Council in Washington, DC also mentioned above, calculates the value of this contribution to be $42.4 billion per year. In other words, if you support nuclear power, you are enabling nuclear weapons.

Is nuclear power really the answer?

— Alfred Meyer is a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and has worked with communities affected by both the Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes.

Endnotes:

[1] Radioactivity is ionizing energy that is damaging to human health and other living things; see page 4, “New Study: Cancer Epidemic.”
[2] The reference is to MIT physicist, ex-Secretary of Energy, and Co-Chair and CEO of Nuclear Threat Initiative (nti.org), Ernest J. Moniz. See: Energy Futures Initiative, “The U.S. Nuclear Energy Enterprise: A Key National Security Enabler,” August 2017.
[3] “What is the value of the U.S. nuclear power complex to U.S. national security,” an Issue Brief by The Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington, DC think tank, Oct. 21, 2019.
[4] National Academy of Sciences, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation BEIR VII, Phase 2” (2006).

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

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