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Emergency Chief: Keep Evacuation Zone

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

In Massachusetts, the chief of emergency management is objecting to a federal plan to allow owners of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station to cut the current 10-mile radius emergency evacuation zone down to the site’s property line. Samantha Phillips, director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, says the “all hazards plan” the state uses for other emergencies would not provide an adequate response for a radiation release. The reactor, near Plymoth on Cape Cod Bay, closed last May 31st. Phillips said the licenced emergency planning for the zone around the reactor should remain in place until all 3,000 waste uranium fuel rod assemblies—now being cooled in a deep pool on site—are transferred to heavy steel and cement dry casks. “The [State’s] overriding interest at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is to maintain public safety,” Phillips says in her letter to Scott Wall, manager of the Division of Operating Reactor Licensing, a branch of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “While the type and probability of public safety risks at a nuclear power station evolve and reflect whether a plant is active or inactive, a nuclear power station undergoing decommissioning and deconstruction nonetheless presents substantial and complex risks to public safety, especially when spent fuel remains in the spent fuel pool.” In the United States, 23 closed nuclear reactors are being decommissioned and thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste fuel remain on site in cooling pools or dry cask storage. —Excerpted from an article by Christine Legere, Cape Cod Times, Nov. 25, 2019

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NRC: “More Than Minor” Radiation Harmless

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

During a two-day-long cross-country road trip, two shipping containers on a flatbed truck were radioactively contaminated on the outside, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a Nov. 22 violation notice sent to Westinghouse Corp., noting “the violation was more than minor.” According to the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick, Wash., “Radioactive contamination on the outside of the containers exceeded that allowed by the US Department of Transportation, the NRC said.” The cylinders started from Westinghouse’s uranium fuel production factory in Columbia, South Carolina, and the contamination on the tanks was noticed when they arrived at Framatome Inc. in Richland, Washington, according to the NRC. The violation notice said the cylinders contained “residue from uranium hexafluoride” (UF6), a toxic, radioactive material used in reactor fuel production. “The contaminated cylinders, shipped on a flatbed trailer that took two days to reach Washington, didn’t endanger the public, the NRC says,” the Herald reported. But the NRC’s “all clear” raised questions about possible exposure experienced by the truck drivers, and ignores the potential exposure of passengers or pedestrians near the flatbed at red lights, in traffic jams, at filling stations, or in parking lots stopped at along the way by the flatbed. UF6 reacts with water or water vapor and forms deadly hydrogen fluoride and a uranium-fluoride. Consequently, leaking or spilled UF6 on the cylinder could have reacted with moisture in the air causing additional exposure hazards. —Savannah River Site Watch; and Tri-City Herald, Nov. 29, 2019, the State (Columbia, SC), Oct. 22, 2018

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Dr. Janette Sherman, 1930 – 2019

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

The renowned professor of oncology and medicine Janette Sherman died Nov. 7 at 89 in Alexandria, Virginia. She had a combination of dementia and Addison’s disease, her daughter Connie Bigelow said. A chemist by training, Dr. Sherman took up toxicology and helped pinpoint how hazardous substances, toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation could lead to cancer, birth defects and other diseases. She also studied the continuing health effects of the world’s worst radiation disasters, in 1986 at Chernobyl in Ukraine and in 2011 at the Fukushima-Daiichi site in Japan. Dr. Sherman edited “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” (Boston: New York Academy of Sciences, 2007), which analyzed thousands of articles in the scientific literature and concluded that the Chernobyl disaster had caused an estimated 985,000 premature deaths…. Dr. Sherman studied the effects of radiation early in her career and later worked with Joseph Mangano, executive director of the nonprofit Radiation and Public Health Project. By analyzing the baby teeth of children who lived near nuclear reactors, they suggested in five peer-reviewed journal articles that even small doses of radiation had caused increases in childhood cancer. [Mr. Mangano emailed on Dec. 1, “Janette was an eminent toxicologist, but focused her energies on nuclear power plant emissions and their health consequences since the mid-1990s. …We all can learn from her example.”] —Excerpted from Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, Nov. 29, 2019.

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8th Worker Exposure of 2019 Halts Work at Hanford

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

The ongoing attempt to clean up vast amounts of nuclear weapons production waste at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State was put on hold again following the 8th case of worker exposure this year. Work was stopped Nov. 14 when contamination was found on an employee’s skin and clothing as he was leaving the “324 building” area, one of the most contaminated sites on the 570 square mile compound. “DOE officials have said the contamination beneath the building is so radioactive that it would be fatal within a few minutes of human contact,” the Tri-City Herald reported. According to Ty Blackford, president of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., at Hanford, “The employee was easily decontaminated using standard techniques,” the Herald reported. The 324 building is a mere 300 yards from the Columbia River, a drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of people. The 324 building “sits over a leak of radioactive cesium and strontium into the soil beneath it,” the Herald reported, and the AP said that the Energy Department intends to push on with demolition of the structure. —Tri-City Herald, Associated Press, and KNDO TV, Nov. 20, 2019

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Radioactive Particles Possibly Migrating from California’s Woolsey Fire

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Kelly Lundeen and Maggie Gunderson

Last November, the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles, California caused three immediate deaths and concern nationwide—from West Coast residents including the Kardashians to the East Coast nonprofit organization Fairewinds Energy Education.

What’s worrisome is the potential re-suspension and dispersal of radioactive contamination from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a Superfund site where the fire began. A partial meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment at SSFL—which was the first nuclear reactor meltdown in the US and cause of the fourth largest release of radioactive iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power—occurred in 1959 and was kept secret for two decades. See the cover story in the Winter 2018-19 Nukewatch Quarterly.

Responding to public alarm, both the US Department of Energy and the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control initially assured the public that the 2018 Woolsey Fire had not affected the contaminated areas, that no radioactivity was released, and that there was no threat to nearby communities. When satellite photographs revealed the contrary, both agencies were forced to walk back their statements.

Following reactor meltdowns in Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011), nearby wildfires have repeatedly re-suspended radioactive materials that were spewed, dispersed and deposited on surrounding territory. To ascertain where radioactively contaminated micro particles of dust and dirt may have migrated—in the winds that drove the Santa Susana fire all the way to Malibu Beach—Fairewinds Energy Education and Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA) have embarked on an independent sampling project. Fairewinds developed protocols for a “citizen science” program along with Dr. Marco Kaltofen, a radioactive dust expert and professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a private research university in Worcester, Mass. PSR-LA instructed area citizens in gathering more than 400 dust and soil samples following the fire, making this study statistically meaningful. Due to the high cost of the five-stage process using Geiger counters, liquid scintillation detectors, and scanning electron microscopes, only 20 of the first batch of 100 samples are currently at the laboratory. Learn more about the ongoing program at <www.fairewinds.org/woolsey-fire-blog>.

—M. Gunderson, Fairewinds Energy Education, Sept. 2019; Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette, Chelsey Green Publishing, 2012, p. 63.

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