Radiation Exposure

December 21, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Study: Contrary to Early ‘All Clear’, California’s Woolsey Wildfire Dispersed Radioactivity from Contaminated Santa Susana Lab Site

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

From Denise Duffield, PSR Los Angeles; Melissa Bumstead, Parents Vs SSFL; and Marco Kaltofen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

A study published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity finds that radioactive contamination from California’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) was lofted off site during the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which began at SSFL. The study calls into question early and highly implausible claims by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) and its toxics department that no contamination was released.

SSFL is a former testing complex for nuclear reactors and rocket engines located about 30 miles from Los Angeles in hills above the San Fernando Valley. For decades, accidents, spills, and fires at the SSFL, including a partial reactor meltdown in July 1959, resulted in extensive radioactive and chemical contamination that has not been cleaned up. The 1959 fuel melting caused the worst atmospheric release of radioactive iodine-131 in US history, and was the fourth worst in the world after Fukushima, in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Windscale in England.

This photo’s black star shows tracks made by alpha rays emitted from a particle of plutonium in the lung tissue of an ape. Inside the body, alpha rays can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. Photo by Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, 1987.

The study found radioactive particles associated with the fire at SSFL as high as nineteen times background [radiation levels] as much as nine miles away. And it concludes that “some ashes and dusts collected from the Woolsey Fire zone in the fire’s immediate aftermath contained high activities of radioactive isotopes associated with the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. … and confirmed the presence of radioactive micro-particles in the Woolsey Fire-related ashes and dusts.”

The findings contradict conclusions by CalEPA’s Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which, a mere nine hours after the fire began on November 8, 2018, declared that the fire didn’t result in releases of hazardous materials. CalEPA/DTSC issued an interim study in December 2018, affirmed in a final version in December 2020, which asserted that “data from sampling and measurements did not detect the release of chemical or radiological contaminants from SSFL.” The assurances were widely criticized at the time, and the new findings have both disproved them and have reinvigorated widespread concerns about the failure to fully clean up SSFL as long promised.

The new study “Radioactive micro-particles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA” was conducted by Marco Kaltofen of the Dept. of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Maggie and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. It examined 360 samples of household dust, surface soils, and ash from 150 homes and elsewhere, collected from December 2018 to February 2019.

Radioactive micro-particles in ash and recently-settled dusts collected just after the Woolsey fire, were “found in Thousand Oaks, CA, and Simi Valley, CA, about nine and three miles from SSFL, respectively. The Thousand Oaks samples had alpha count rates up to 19 times background,” the study reports. The researchers noted that alpha radiation-emitting thorium was the source of this excess radioactivity. The authors warn of small, dispersed alpha particles because of the “high risk of inhalation-related long-term biological damage from internal alpha emitters compared to external radiation,” the authors report.

Had the state and the parties responsible for the contamination (Boeing, NASA, and the Energy Department) met their legally binding obligations to clean up SSFL by the 2017 deadline, the 2018 fire couldn’t have released contamination. Further failure to clean the site poses continuing risks to the nearby population, warned Congressional and local elected officials in an Oct. 14 letter.

Lawmakers Complain of Clean-up Failure, Delays, and Gutted Decontamination Standards

There is widespread concern among elected officials and the community about secret negotiations between the state and Boeing Corp. that could further delay the cleanup, and allow giant military contractor to walk away from its radioactive and chemical contamination. California Congressional rep’s Brad Sherman, Julia Brownley, Jose Luis Correa, Graciela Flores Napolitano, and US Senator Alex Padilla sent a letter to CalEPA October 14 reminding the agency: “The 2007 Consent Order and 2020 Administrative Orders on Consent … required that soil cleanup be completed by 2017, however the agreed upon soil remediation at the site has yet to begin. We are deeply concerned about the lengthy delays….” In addition, County Supervisors from Ventura and Los Angeles County, six city mayors, and a Los Angeles City Council member wrote October 14 to CalEPA declaring, “We are opposed to any action that would significantly delay or weaken site cleanup.” The officials singled out the state’s failure to enforce the 2007 Consent Order, confidential negotiations between DTSC and Boeing, and potential changes to methodology rules that could delay or weaken clean-up requirements; as well as delays in the Programmatic Environmental Impact Report.

The core of such a Boeing-Newsom Administration deal could allow as much as twenty times higher levels of contamination than permitted currently. CalEPA remains in secret negotiations with Boeing.

“Federally funded studies have previously confirmed that contamination [above] US EPA levels of concern has migrated off site, and that the incidence of key cancers in the neighboring communities increases with proximity to the site,” said Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. “In addition, site owner Boeing has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for exceeding contamination limits in surface water runoff leaving the site over many years. Until [those] responsible for the pollution finally live up to their clean-up agreements, people living around the site will be at further risk to their health,” Duffield said.

“The bottom line is, if SSFL had been cleaned up by 2017 as required by the clean-up agreements, the community wouldn’t have had to worry about contamination released by the Woolsey Fire,” said Melissa Bumstead, co-founder of Parents vs. SSFL. “My daughter is a two-time cancer survivor, and no parent should have to worry that the SSFL might give their child cancer when there’s a fire on site, or when it rains or it’s windy.”

December 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Ignoring Outcry, Mockery, Japan Intends 2023 Start of Fukushima Wastewater Dumping

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

On October 18, Japan’s Prime Minster Fumio Kishida said there would be no postponement of its plan to pollute the Pacific Ocean with 1.27 million metric tons of radioactive cooling water from Fukushima’s destroyed reactors. Kishida said releasing the “heavily diluted” waste water would begin in the spring of 2023. The dispersal is expected to continue for decades as the accumulation of radioactive cooling water increases by 150 tons every day. The water becomes severely contaminated after being poured over large volumes of roiling, not, melted uranium and mixed uranium/plutonium fuel under Fukushima-Daiichi’s three destroyed nuclear reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi was openly mocked with laughter by the dignitaries at COP26 on November 4. The adamantly pro-nuclear Grossi had said before the large audience, “No one died from radiation at Fukushima,” provoking the laughs. “I don’t know why you’re laughing, it’s a fact,” he griped. Earlier Grossi warmed up the crowd with this thigh-slapper: “We control this activity so it does not cause any harm.” Grossi’s job is difficult since under its United Nations Statute, the IAEA has only one objective: “The Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy … throughout the world.”

Japan’s April decision to further pollute the Pacific caused an uproar in dozens of Pacific rim of countries. South Korean officials denounced Kishida’s declaration the same day, saying that it represents a “grave threat” to the marine environment. South Korea continues to ban seafood imports from the Fukushima region and has repeatedly condemned the dumping plan, which a senior South Korean foreign ministry official said, “could affect our people’s health and security as well as the ocean environment.”

Alternatives to the ocean dumping include long-term tank storage, more thorough filtering, or evaporation, and in 2019 Japan’s own ministry of economy and industry recommended including evaporation in its list of waste water options.

China’s Global Times reported in October that Liu Jiangyong, vice dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, asked if the wastewater will be processed and will have no impact on the marine environment and food web as the Japanese government claimed, why can’t the water be recycled on land? Japan can’t answer any of these questions, said Liu. The ideal plan would be for Japan to process the wastewater to a safe level and recycle it, rather than dump it into the sea, said Liu.

A June letter to Japan’s permanent mission to the United Nations signed by a group of 70 groups, including Nukewatch, warned: “The dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific is also a violation of international law. The 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter and the London Protocol prohibit dumping of any concentration of radioactive material into the sea.”

In May, three human rights experts appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council issued a statement that expressed “deep regret” at Japan’s dumping plan and “reminded Japan of its international obligations to prevent exposure to hazardous substances, to conduct environmental impact assessments of the risks that the discharge of water may have, to prevent transboundary environmental harms, and to protect the marine environment.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), operators of the Fukushima complex, announced August 24 it would construct a tunnel underwater to release the 1.27 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Tepco said it would start building at least one 8-foot diameter half-mile-long tunnel in March 2022 by hollowing out bedrock on the seabed near the No. 5 reactor at Fukushima, Japan Times reported.

Critics around the world immediately denounced the plan as an attempt to avoid any oversight, monitoring, or independent inspection of the radioactive materials in the waste water.

“…to dump it into an ocean, where we share the same tides, current, and fish, it is a level up from urgent for us,” said Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, noting that even basic concerns had not yet been addressed. “Currently we are not satisfied there will be no harm to our Blue Pacific,” he told Civil Beat in September.

A regional collective of young activists called Youngsolwara Pacific has condemned the dumping plan and Japan’s lack of consultation. Likewise, a senior South Korean foreign ministry official told China’s Global Times in October that, “Japan’s decision was made without enough consultations with neighboring nations.” Talei Luscia Mangioni, a researcher at Australian National University and Youngsolwara Pacific member, said “… this is an act of transboundary harm. ” And it is typical, she said, considering the history of nuclear powers that “have treated the Pacific as a sacrifice zone.”

In Iitate village 24 miles from Fukushima’s meltdowns, Nobuyoshi Ito, a former computer engineer, has been measuring the radioactive properties in the food and soil for nearly a decade. Mr. Ito always carries a monitor and is constantly recording radiation levels, “trying to determine what is and isn’t safe to eat, and where it is and isn’t safe to go,” CBS News reported last August. While the town’s evacuation orders are gone, Ito says people — especially children — shouldn’t return. “It will take 300 years to restore the village to its original state, and it will continue to emit radiation for 300 years,” he said.

On September 22, the United States lifted its weak restrictions on imported food stuffs from Japan, and food products free of inspection now include even rice harvested in Fukushima. According to Japan’s farm ministry, the US is the 3d-largest importer of its food products and were worth $1.09 billion in 2020. Fourteen countries continue to maintain their food import bans. FDA officials say they’d determining a “very low risk” to US consumers from radioactive contaminants in the foods. — JL

December 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US Senators Join Fight for Palomares Vets’ Compensaton

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Editor’s note: Four US senators have urged Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough to withdraw the VA’s appeal of a federal court order granting class action status to veterans contaminated with plutonium in Palomares, Spain, after a 1966 nuclear weapons crash. The senators’ October 12, 2021 letter, lightly edited, follows.

Dear Mr. Secretary,

We write to respectfully request you withdraw your appeal in Skaar v. McDonough now before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, concerning the claims of approximately 1,400 veterans exposed to dangerous radiation during the 1966 nuclear clean-up operation in Palomares, Spain. Instead of pursuing your appeal, which will only serve to further delay relief for these veterans, we urge you to use your rulemaking authority to finally provide long-overdue care and assistance to Palomares veterans by including Palomares in the list of [service related] “radiation-risk activities” under 38 CFR 3.309. Events with lower levels of radiation exposure are already on that list, and civilian workers who buried sealed barrels filled with Palomares soil — a similar, but even less risky task than that performed by the Palomares veterans — receive presumptive benefits…

By way of background, in 1966, approximately 1,400 US service members were exposed to dangerous levels of ionizing radiation when they were deployed to clean up the crash site of a B-52 bomber which was carrying nuclear warheads. These service members worked, slept, and ate at the crash site, shoveling radioactive plutonium dust into barrels for weeks without proper protective equipment. In the decades since, many of those veterans have developed radiation-related illnesses that require medical treatment and numerous veterans have already died from these conditions, leaving the survivors to continue to fight for recognition and benefits. The US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC) recently ordered the VA to reexamine the methodology by which it adjudicates disability benefits claims for veterans of the 1966 Palomares nuclear disaster. This decision came one year after the CAVC had permitted veteran Victor Skaar to proceed with this challenge on behalf of a class of Palomares veterans. [emphasis added]

At its heart, Mr. Skaar’s legal challenge is about the failure to recognize the radiation exposure of the Palomares veterans. The VA does not include Palomares in its list of radiation exposure events … and it has relied on an unsound method to calculate individual exposures instead…. The merits of this argument have not yet been resolved. Rather, the CAVC ordered only that the Board of Veterans’ Appeals is required to review Mr. Skaar’s evidence and adequately adjudicate his legal challenge. Yet, the VA has chosen to appeal even this interim ruling.

… The Court’s orders in Skaar, from which you now appeal, are long-awaited, critical steps towards securing benefits and health care for these veterans. Tragically, many of them have died during their decades-long fight for recognition, and the very youngest among them are now in their seventies. We urge you not to further prolong justice for these now aging and ill veterans by pursing an unnecessary appeal of the Court’s class certification and remand orders, before the merits of the Palomares veterans’ claims have fully been heard. This case truly embodies the legal maxim that justice delayed is justice denied. The VA’s decision to appeal the Court’s class certification and remand orders before the merits have been fully reached, will add potentially years of delay to resolution of this case, when the affected service members simply do not have that time to spare. To put it bluntly, more Palomares veterans will die during the pendency of this litigation if the VA continues with this appeal. You have the authority to act to their benefit, and we strongly urge you to do so expeditiously by withdrawing your appeal.

Sincerely, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Dianne Feinstein, D-California, Christopher Coons, D-Delaware,

Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut.

~~~~~

Note from the Lead Plaintiff

On November 8, Victor Skaar emailed Nukewatch with this update: “I obtained the ‘official’ urinalyses of myself and of each of the other ‘high 26’ [who were] selected by USAF medical scientists to submit follow-up specimens to the Radiological Health Lab, six, twelve, and eighteen months after departure [from Spain]. Those were the only data evaluated by the USAF Surgeon General’s contracted bio-environmental engineering team — Labat-Anderson…. [This team] did not consider any specimen results collected and submitted while we were on the [Palomares] site, working with constant exposure to plutonium and other radioactive materials. Obviously, that stupid, arbitrary, non-scientific decision resulted in the ‘desired’ mathematical result of our exposure of 4.6 rems — slightly less than the [allowed maximum] of 5.0 rems — therefore, we were ‘not exposed.’

“To me John, this is evidence of the AF/SG Staff knowingly, and purposely, falsifying the official data to demonstrate our ‘non-exposure.’”— Victor Skaar

October 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Regulators Approve Private Radioactive Waste Dump Critics, Texas State Law, and Court Challenge May Derail Plan

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021

By Beyond Nuclear

On September 13 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted a license for a controversial centralized storage site for high-level radioactive waste in west Texas, on the New Mexico border. If it’s ever opened, the site would concentrate up to 40,000 tons of the waste uranium fuel from nuclear power reactors across the United States in one place.

The firm Interim Storage Partners (ISP), a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists and Orano (formerly the French conglomerate Areva), intends to store the irradiated reactor fuel — euphemistically known as “spent” nuclear fuel or SNF, despite the fact that it is highly radioactive and lethal — in heavy dry storage canisters on surface concrete pads. If completed, it would be the first private high-level radioactive waste site in the United States. As Ari Natter reported for Bloomberg, “The waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.” [See: How Long Does Reactor Waste Stay Deadly? p.4]

A second centralized waste dump in New Mexico, 35 miles from the ISP site, and proposed by Holtec International, is also expected to be approved by the NRC. Holtec wants a license to store another 173,600 metric tons of waste fuel in partly buried canisters. Since the total volume of this waste fuel at US reactors is about 90,000 metric tons, experts have asked why the two sites would seek a combined capacity of 213,600 metric tons. One possibility is that waste from other countries could be imported by the for-profit dump projects. The government has previously done so, storing foreign waste at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, and, in 2018, testing the transport of a “mock SNF cask” shipped from Europe to Colorado.

Lucky this time. No radioactive waste was involved on Dec. 18, 2017 when an Amtrak passenger train jumped the tracks near Tacoma, Washington and slammed into Interstate 5. The recent approval of centralized nuclear waste storage in Texas could launch thousands of risky, cross-country rail, truck and barge shipments. Photo: Washington State Patrol/Twitter

Opening either of the Desert Southwest dumps would set in motion thousands of transport shipments of the high-level waste which would cross at least 44 states. The loaded canisters and transport casks are subject to radiation leakage and other failures that pose threats to thousands of communities along the transport routes.

“Transporting highly radioactive waste is inherently high-risk,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist with Beyond Nuclear. “Fully loaded irradiated nuclear fuel containers would be among the very heaviest loads on the roads, rails, and waterways. They would test the structural integrity of degraded rails and bridges, risking derailments,” he said.

Kamps continued, “Even if the nation’s infrastructure is ever renovated, the shipping containers themselves will remain vulnerable to severe accidents and terrorist attacks, which could release catastrophic amounts of lethal radioactivity, possibly in a densely populated urban area. Even so-called ‘routine’ or ‘incident-free’ shipments are like mobile X-ray machines that can’t be turned off, in terms of the hazardous emissions of gamma and neutron radiation, dosing innocent passersby as well as transport workers.”

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board recommends spending a minimum of a decade to develop better SNF cask and canister designs before attempting to transport irradiated nuclear fuel. Yet ISP expects its “Consolidated Interim Storage Facility” to open and start accepting shipments in the next few years. However, a lawsuit in federal court and near-unanimous opposition in the Texas legislature to importing spent nuclear fuel could upend ISP’s expectations.

Siting nuclear facilities is supposed to require the consent of the host communities, but Texas has made it clear on every level it does not consent. In September, prior to the NRC licensing of the ISP facility, the Texas legislature approved a bill banning storage or disposal of high-level radioactive waste in the state, and directing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to deny state permits that the ISP project needs. The measure passed the Texas Senate unanimously, and passed the Texas House 119-3.

“This kind of bipartisan vote is very rare,” said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition. “The message should be loud and clear: Texas doesn’t want the nation’s deadliest nuclear waste and does not consent to being a dumping ground.”

Texas Governor Abbott signed the bill into law a week before the NRC’s license approval. After it, Gov. Abbot said on Twitter, “Texas will not become America’s nuclear waste dumping ground.” Before the Texas Legislature passed the law, opposition to the ISP project in Texas was widespread and vocal.

Abbott and a group of Texas Congressional Representatives wrote to the NRC opposing the project. Resolutions against importing the waste to Texas were passed by Andrews County and five others, as well as three cities, representing a total of 5.4 million Texans. School districts, the Midland Chamber of Commerce, and oil and gas companies joined environmental and faith-based groups in opposing the ISP project.

“I am thankful that the Texas Legislature voted to stop this dangerous nuclear waste from coming to their state,” said Rose Gardner of the watchdog group Alliance for Environmental Strategies. Gardner is a party in a federal court challenge to the dumps. Two lawsuits that could block both the ISP project in Texas and the Holtec project in New Mexico — on the grounds that they violate federal law — are currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Temporary dumps prohibited by federal law

Both dump proposals are based on the presumption that the Energy Department will “take title” to the deadly material as it leaves the privately owned reactor sites, and free its current owners of liability for it. However, the transfer of ownership from private hands to the federal government is specifically prohibited by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982, as Amended, unless and until a permanent, deep dump site is open and operating — a prospect that remains decades away. The liability provision in the NWPA legally prevents “interim” storage sites from becoming permanent by default.

The Texas and New Mexico sites’ licensing processes have been approved in violation of the NWPA on the presumption that the law will be amended again.

“The NRC should never have even considered these applications, because they blatantly violate the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act by assuming that the federal government will take responsibility [ownership] of the waste before a permanent repository is licensed and operating,” said Diane Curran, an attorney for Beyond Nuclear, one of the groups that brought the suits. “Licensing the ISP and Holtec facilities would defeat Congress’s purpose of ensuring that high-level waste generated by US reactors will go to a deep geologic repository, rather than to vulnerable surface facilities that may become permanent nuclear waste dumps.”

Now that the NRC has approved the ISP facility, the briefing phase of the federal Court of Appeals lawsuit is expected to begin. Participants in the legal challenge to the ISP and Holtec facilities are a national coalition of watchdog groups that includes Beyond Nuclear, the Sierra Club, the Austin-based SEED Coalition, and Don’t Waste Michigan.

Both lawsuits were also joined by Fasken Land & Minerals, Ltd., an oil and gas company, and the Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners Association which promotes ranching and mineral rights.

“The grand illusion of nuclear power is now revealed,” said Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan.

“There is nowhere to put the waste. No community consents to accept nuclear waste — not Texas, not Michigan, or anywhere on the planet. We have to stop making it,” Keegan said.

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Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

From Denise Duffield, PSR Los Angeles; Melissa Bumstead, Parents Vs SSFL; and Marco Kaltofen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021

By Beyond Nuclear

Temporary dumps prohibited by federal law

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