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May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nukewatch Celebrates Nuclear Ban Treaty’s First Anniversary

 

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Kelly Lundeen

For people struggling to achieve peace, the war in Ukraine reinforces feelings of grief and despair, yet the anti-nuclear global majority continues to move slowly toward nuclear abolition. The year 2021 saw eight more nations ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), bringing the total to 60 ratifications and 86 signatories. Even though the nuclear weapons states have not caught onto the nuclear weapons ban trend, the U.S. government was reminded on January 22 when, despite ongoing Covid restrictions, nearly 60 events took place to celebrate the first anniversary of the entry into force of the TPNW, all with the same message — join the Treaty!

The Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative (NBTC), of which Nukewatch is a founding member, coordinated a day of action, creating resources and hosting zoom calls to bring the nationwide movement together again this year. Around the country, groups marked the occasion by dancing, bannering, singing, bell ringing, moments of silence, flower delivery, letter delivery, Treaty delivery, and sharing cupcakes. Ralph Hutchison of Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance created an inspiring video compilation of many of these actions.

Nukewatch participated in this year’s day of action through our webinar production with the Affected Communities & Allies Working Group, one of four working groups in the NBTC. Two hundred ninety people registered for the zoom webinar we called “Nuclear Colonialism in the Age of the Ban Treaty.” Both videos can be found at: nukewatchinfo.org/videos.

The seminar highlighted the lived experience of speakers and artists from affected communities to activate our collective work toward disarmament. They wove together the history of nuclear colonialism from uranium mining, nuclear testing, production, and use. One of the speakers and a member of the Affected Communities & Allies Working Group, Benetick Kabua Maddison of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, quoted his uncle David Kabua, president of the Marshall Islands: “Before the nuclear testing program the Marshallese people had no allies. But 76 years later we have allies all over the world, simply because of us using our voices to raise awareness about these issues that are impacting us.”

Please join the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative to promote the TPNW and open more spaces where impacted voices can be elevated. Find out how to get involved in a working group and watch for upcoming action alerts at:

nuclearbantreaty.org

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Office News, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s Endless Cleanup: Mistakes Prompt More Decontamination

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John LaForge

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) plans to pump all 1.27 million tons of its contaminated water — which is peppered with over 60 radioactive materials and now stored in over 1,000 giant tanks onshore — into the Pacific Ocean commons. The water gets contaminated because it is pumped inside the three destroyed Fukushima reactors to cover hundreds of tons of thermally and radioactively hot, melted, destroyed reactor fuel (called “corium”). Tepco workers pump the water in to keep the fuel wreckage from going “critical,” melting further, and spewing more radiation. Additionally, tons of groundwater pours into the reactor building basements through earthquake cracks in the foundations, and it also passes over the corium, becoming intensely radioactive. The amount of waste water increases every day by 140 tons, Tepco says.

The company claims to be running out of storage space on land for the giant tanks (although the fishing community, environmental watchdogs, South Korea, China, and other Pacific Rim countries have contested the claim).

One-ton bags of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, wood and litter scraped from the ground after the triple meltdown at Fukushima.

Now, copying the likes of France and Britain before them, Tepco and the government announced last year that the company will build a huge drain pipe and pump its pollution into the Ocean. This caused an international uproar, but the plan is moving ahead with federal government approval.

Then last summer Tepco announced that it will drill an undersea tunnel 40-feet deep and about 0.62 miles long for a wastewater drain, and said it would start drilling by the end of March 2022. The 8.2-foot diameter tunnel “requires penetrating the bedrock about [36 feet] below the surface of the [seafloor], according to the utility,” the daily Asahi Shimbun reported last August 26. “We have no idea how fast we can dig into the seafloor until we conduct a drilling survey into the bedrock,” a Tepco official told the paper.

Tepco’s tunnel idea replaces its earlier plan to lay a pipeline on the seabed. On December 20, 2022, ARD-TV Germany reported the puzzling explanation that, “The tunnel will run below the seabed so that it is not damaged by an earthquake or tsunami and by the current.” It was unclear how earthquakes — like the monstrous 9.0 magnitude that struck March 11, 2021, and actually moved the landmass of Honshu Island, Japan’s largest, one full meter — would not damage bedrock. Severe earthquakes have repeatedly rocked the Fukushima region of northeast Japan since 2011. The most recent was a frightening 7.4 magnitude quake on March 16, 2022.

Agence France Press reported that Tepco’s “chief decommissioning officer Akira Ono said releasing the water through a tunnel would help prevent it flowing back to the shore.” Ono went on to say, “We will thoroughly explain our safety policies and the measures we are taking against reputation damage,” appearing more concerned about the company’s image than about its contamination of the Pacific Ocean food web.

After Tepco acknowledged that its water filter system failed to remove radioactive materials as promised, the company has said it will re-filter the water already in its tanks. In addition, the company says the water will be diluted 40-to-1 with regular seawater before being pumped into the Pacific. One-million tons is so large a volume that Tepco estimates its re-filtering, diluting and dumping scheme will take 40 years to complete.

Decades-long practice of ocean dumping

Tepco’s ocean dumping plan recalls France’s practice at La Hague, where a waste “reprocessing” system has for decades pumped liquid radioactive effluent into the English Channel. Greenpeace has reported that La Hague dumps “one million liters [264,000 gallons] of liquid radioactive waste per day,” and the British Medical Journal published a study in 1997 that warned of an increased risk of leukemia for children who played regularly on beaches near La Hague’s effluent pipe.

Britain’s reprocessing complex at Sellafield pours radioactive waste through a mile-long pipeline into the Irish Sea, waste that’s known to be contaminated with plutonium, cesium, and other radionuclides. Radioactivity from the site was picked up in shellfish in Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, and in local seafood. “The nuclear industry’s irresponsible ‘out of sight-out of mind’ approach must now stop for good,” said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Diederik Samsom, on June 26, 2000. Instead, the corporate contamination of the world’s greatest ocean with privately owned radioactive waste is being franchised to Japan, in order to cut costs.

Twenty-two Million Tons of Bagged Rad Waste

The Washington Post has reported that at Fukushima vast “quantities of contaminated soil and water are being stored onsite while political leaders decide what to do with it…” But millions of bags of waste are not just “onsite.”

About two inches of the ground was scraped up from fields, flower beds, parks, and playgrounds across some 324 square miles in 52 cities, Germany’s Deutsche Welle reported. Millions of one-ton plastic bags filled with contaminated soil, leaves, wood chippings, and other debris are piling up outdoors in thousands of places awaiting transfer to a landfill just outside Fukushima.

The massive landfill may eventually hold up to 22 million bags of the waste, the Los Angeles Times reported. Ten-ton trucks can carry only seven of the heavy bags at a time, the Times said, noting that “At that rate, transport could take decades. Material might have to be put into fresh bags if they start to break down before they can be moved.”

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

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

A Turn for the Worse–Failure of Water Filtration at Fukushima

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Robert Hunziker

The cooling water continuously poured over the reactors’ creakily dilapidated ruins turns radioactive, almost instantaneously, and must be processed via the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), intended to remove most radioactive materials….

Here’s the big new danger: As ALPS processes radioactively contaminated water, it flushes out a “slurry” of highly concentrated radioactive material….

How to handle and dispose of the radioactive slurry may be an impossible quagmire, and a big one, since the storage containers for the tainted slurry quickly degrade because of the high concentration of radioactive, caustic, corrosive chemicals in the material. The storage containers, in turn, have to be regularly replaced as the  slurry’s caustics eats away at the containers’ liners.

Radioactive slurry is muddy and resembles a shampoo in appearance, and it contains highly radioactive strontium readings that reach tens of millions of Becquerels per-cubic-centimeter. However, according to the EPA 148 Becquerels per-cubic-meter, not centimeter, is the allowable level for human exposure. Thus, Becquerels in the tens of millions per-cubic-centimeter is “off the charts” dangerous….

Since March 2013, Tepco has accumulated 3,373 special vessels that hold these highly toxic radioactive slurry concentrations. But, because the integrity of the vessels deteriorates so quickly, the durability of the containers reaches a limit, meaning the vessels will need replacement by mid-2025.

Transferring this slurry is a time-consuming, highly dangerous, even horrific job, which creates yet a second series of unacceptable risks of radioactive substances released into the air during transfer of slurry. Tepco expects to open and close the transfers “remotely” (using robots). But as of January 2, 2022, Tepco had not yet revealed acceptable plans for dealing with the necessary transfer of slurry from weakening, almost deteriorated containers, into fresh, new containers. (“Tepco Slow to Respond to Growing Crisis at Fukushima Plant,” The Asahi Shimbun, January 2, 2022)

— Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles. This is an excerpt from a longer piece at Counterpunch, Jan. 10, 2022.

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

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power Fails as Big Business & Worsens Climate Chaos

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Tim Judson and Linda Pentz Gunter

The climate crisis is upon us, and we have no time to lose. We cannot afford a single false step. Even as the UN COP26 climate conference failed to put us on the necessary path to keep the world within 1.5 degrees Celsius of increased warming, there are still important choices to be made as countries roll out their latest climate plans.

That is why the United States, in its pursuit of carbon reductions, must not allow itself to be misled by the false promises of nuclear power, both its continued use and illusory new programs. Either would be a mistake.

The push to develop new nuclear is focused on so-called advanced reactors and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), but the cost and safety uncertainties of these designs have not been satisfactorily addressed.

Yet Congress is already looking to award two “advanced” fast reactor designs — the Terrapower Natrium reactor, and X-energy Xe-100 reactor — and an extravagant $3.2 billion in subsidies, even though the former is a project of billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

SMRs, typically less than one-third the size of a traditional nuclear power reactor, would need to be brought on by the hundreds if not thousands to achieve the advertised cost savings, a factor that has left designs on the drawing board for decades and has not attracted buyers. Even if these unproven designs work, such a program could never be achieved at a scale or in time to make a dent in carbon emissions.

The likelihood of failure is increased by the recent experience of building new, traditional reactors. They consistently suffer lengthy delays and massive cost increases, which suggests that commercializing new, untested reactor designs will not go faster or be cheaper.

For example, another $1 billion was just added to the ever-escalating tab for two Westinghouse reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia — underway since 2013, yet still unfinished — with costs ballooning to over $33 billion and further delays likely pushing final completion into 2024.

The French-designed Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) is arguably a spectacular failure with massive cost-overruns, long delays, and endless technical flaws. Most recently, at the now-operating Taishan 1 EPR in China, vibrations damaged fuel rods, forcing its shutdown. The problem could be linked to a design flaw also found in the four still unfinished EPRs in Europe, causing a French nuclear lab to raise doubts about their safety.

 

False choice: climate chaos or cancer-causing pollution

Recognizing these challenges, the U.S. nuclear industry is focusing most of its energy on keeping its current fleet of 93 reactors running, arguing that they are carbon-free. This is patently false — and not true of any human-made energy source, including renewables, as long as mining, transportation, and manufacturing of these technologies are so reliant on fossil fuels.

However, the “zero-emission” mantra has been used to justify the inclusion of nuclear power in state and federal subsidies. If it had survived the machinations of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the promising Build Back Better Act may have still shot itself in the foot by including a massive $35 billion subsidy for already-operating nuclear reactors in its “Zero-Emissions Nuclear Energy Production Credit.” This subsidy would have funneled billions of dollars to corporations that own nuclear reactors, nearly all of which will continue operating with or without such support.

Subsidizing nuclear power siphons funds from real solutions, like renewables, just when these are needed most urgently, thereby making climate change worse.

Redirecting funds to old reactors further misses the point: even if reactors were carbon-free, nuclear power is not a good way to address the climate crisis, because it ignores the two biggest climate drawbacks — time and cost.

As Stanford physicist Amory Lovins has pointed out, to address the climate crisis expeditiously and effectively, we must choose energy sources that can reduce the greatest amount of carbon emissions most quickly and at the least cost. This is where renewable energy, energy efficiency, and conservation beat nuclear power — and new gas and coal as well.

A recent Sussex University study showed that countries that have focused on nuclear power have not significantly reduced carbon emissions, while countries with strong renewable energy programs have.

Nuclear power has no business case and takes too long. That alone should rule it out as useful to climate protection, even before we look at other disqualifying factors such as the environmental justice and health impacts of long-lived lethal radioactive waste and potential meltdowns. Our future should not hinge on the nuclear industry’s false choice between climate chaos and cancer-causing pollution. We can and must do better.

 

— Tim Judson is executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a non-profit environmental organization founded in 1978 that works for a just and equitable transition to renewable energy and a nuclear-free, carbon-free world.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear non-profit organization working for a world free from nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

— This commentary ran originally in The Hill, December 21, 2021

 

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

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Quietly Discloses Plans for Mass, Cross-Country Shipments of High-Level Radioactive Waste

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John LaForge

How far is your house or apartment from a major highway or railroad line? Do you want to play Russian Roulette with radioactive waste in transit for 40 to 60 years?

In December the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff quietly reported preparing for tens of thousands of cross-country shipments of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors to the desert Southwest. The oft-disparaged U.S. infrastructure of decrepit roads, faulty bridges, rickety rails, and rusty barges may not be ready for such an onrush of immensely heavy radioactive waste casks.

Diane D’Arrigo, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in Maryland, and Leona Morgan, with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico, report that the transports would carry “the hottest, most concentrated atomic waste from the nuclear fuel chain, misleadingly dubbed ‘spent nuclear fuel.’ This radioactive waste can cause death in minutes if unshielded, and remains radioactive for literally millions of years; it is one of the most deadly materials on Earth.”

In his Dec. 2, 2021, letter to NRC commissioners, Daniel Dorman, NRC’s executive director for operations, wrote that: “To prepare for a potential large-scale commercial transportation campaign, staff … assessed the NRC’s readiness for oversight of a large-scale, multi-mode, multi-package, extended-duration campaign” of heavy radioactive waste shipments by trains, trucks, and barges. The NRC’s “assessment” was published Dec. 17, 2021 with Dorman’s letter, which noted that waste is now stored in cooling pools and/or heavy outdoor casks near the reactors that produce it — at 75 sites across the country.

Dorman’s letter — unearthed Jan. 4, 2022  by Michael Keegan of the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes — reports, “The NRC received two applications to construct and operate consolidated interim storage facilities for [high-level waste], using dry storage systems, at sites in Texas and New Mexico.” In September 2021, the NRC issued a license to Interim Storage Partners Inc. for the Texas site, and a license decision is pending on a Holtec Corp. proposal for New Mexico. Both projects are the subject of lawsuits that will slow the industry’s and government’s rush to establish a dumpsite.

One U.S. Department of Energy proposal is to ship highly radioactive waste fuel on barges across parts of Lake Michigan.

 

Consolidated waste storage

Critics of the licensing process are demanding that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board halt the Holtec procedure because it is illegal. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act “only allows the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to take ownership of irradiated nuclear fuel at an operating permanent geologic repository,” NIRS notes. “Such a title- and liability-transfer to DOE at the ‘interim’ site proposed by Holtec is not allowed.”

NIRS reports that “The Holtec [company’s] license application says the lethal waste at the site would be owned by either the DOE or the nuclear utility companies that made it.” Yet at one licensing hearing, Holtec’s lawyer, Jay Silberg, admitted that under current law, DOE cannot take title and ownership of the waste at an “interim” centralized storage site.

Presently, “dry casks” that hold the waste onsite near reactors are not the same canisters required for long-haul transport. Dangerous repackaging and testing will be required. Government environmental impact statements, regarding thousands of these shipments over a decades-long timeline, have officially predicted an alarming number of accidents, crashes, and potential disasters.

Maps of likely transport routes produced by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects are available at BeyondNuclear.org. The maps show cities, states, and congressional districts “potentially affected by shipments” and are based on DOE plans from 2008 for the discredited Yucca Mountain dump site near Las Vegas. Yucca Mountain was scientifically disqualified and cancelled during the Obama Administration, but Nevada’s maps shed light on routes to the New Mexico and Texas sites, because the further away from the Southwest such waste shipments originate, the more similar-to-identical the transport routes would be.

The Texas and New Mexico dump site owners (Interim Storage Partners and Holtec) in league with the NRC, have kept their shipment plans obscure and secretive. The waste’s producers and managers don’t want the public to know if or when “Mobile Chernobyls” could start passing through towns and cities, or to start organizing to stop them. They know there are reasons to protest: the government has even proposed Great Lakes water routes that would see heavy, high-level waste casks on barges — a scheme critics have called “the Edmund Fitzgerald Plan” — and the gales of November be damned.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

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