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Radioactive Waste Fuel Pools Declared ‘No Danger to the Public’

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

KEWAUNEE, Wisconsin—The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted Dominion Energy in October a request to lift disaster preparedness requirements for its shuttered nuclear Kewaunee reactor on Lake Michigan.

“Specifically, Kewaunee will no longer be required to maintain offsite radiological emergency preparedness plans or the 10-mile emergency planning zone,” the NRC announced.

The single reactor Kewaunee station was shut down May 7, 2013 and is undergoing decommissioning. Dominion has said the process will take 40 years.

With hundreds of tons of ferociously radioactive waste uranium fuel—known as “spent fuel”—now in the company’s on-site cooling pool, Kewaunee’s accident preparedness exemptions put lake water and hundreds of thousands of downwind residents at risk. A “loss-of-coolant” accident can cause the fuel to catch fire—like the waste fuel fire that may have occurred at Fukushima in March 2011—resulting in catastrophic radiation releases.

Rose-Colored Safety Assumptions

The NRC conducted a series of “Nuclear Waste Confidence” hearings around the country, along with some “transfer of waste nuclear fuel” proceedings. In all of them, NRC declared that in the event of a catastrophic radioactivity release, large-scale evacuations (out to a certain distance) would go well.

Kevin Kamps, of Beyond Nuclear, the Takoma Park, Maryland think tank, asks: “How is it possible that such evacuations would go well, if emergency preparedness requirements have been eliminated?”

The NRC’s optimistic assumption is at the heart of the agency’s conclusion that there is extremely little danger from waste pool storage. The NRC claims that if there’s a large radiation release due to a fire, no one will get hurt, because everyone will have evacuated out of harm’s way.

NRC staff has concluded that the company “will maintain an acceptable level of emergency preparedness at [Kewaunee]…and that there is reasonable assurance that adequate offsite protective measures can and will be taken by State and local government agencies, if needed, in the event of a radiological emergency.”

The NRC notice claims that, “In the unlikely event of a … complete loss of heat removal …there will be at least 10 hours available before an offsite release might occur and, therefore, at least 10 hours to … restore … heat removal to the spent fuel. … a minimum of 10 hours is considered sufficient time for offsite authorities to …protect the health and safety of the public.”

So far, every US reactor operator that has asked for the exemptions during decommissioning has had their request granted, rubber stamp fashion by the NRC.

Meanwhile, the owners of the Vermont Yankee reactor near Vernon, Vermont have asked for the similar exemptions from accident preparedness rules, but NRC has been far more demanding of Entergy Corp. than of Dominion in Wisconsin.

Vermont Yankee will be shut down at the end of the year, and Entergy has asked that its 10-mile evacuation zone be reduced to the station’s 148 acre footprint.

And while the potential risks of a disastrous waste fuel pool fire are similar at both sites, the NRC has demanded that Entergy rewrite its exemption request, noting three times that the company “inaccurately states” the effects of a waste fuel fire. Left unsaid in the Kewaunee case, the NRC has said about Vermont, “In the unlikely event that there is a catastrophic loss of spent fuel pool water inventory, there is a potential for an offsite release of radioactive material …” —JL

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Accidental Uranium Release at Honeywell Site in Illinois

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

In November, the Honeywell corporation’s Metropolis Works (HMW) uranium processing factory in southern Illinois reported a “plant emergency” when it began spewing clouds of poisonous gas that have since been declared harmless by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Uranium hexafluoride (UF6) leaked from inside the site’s Feed Materials Building at 8:24 p.m. on Oct. 26. Uranium hexafluoride is extremely toxic, is corrosive to most metals and reacts violently with water.

The facility processes raw uranium, or yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, which is enriched at other facilities into uranium fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s accident report, on Sunday Oct. 26, an employee “put on a respirator and confirmed the leak at 8:24 p.m.” Onsite emergency responders shut down operations, and Honeywell declared a “plant emergency” rather than an official “Alert”—the lowest NRC emergency classification for fuel facilities. The Nov. 13 report by the NRC says that the leak began at 7:24 p.m. Sunday, that, “No one was injured and Honeywell declared ‘all clear’ status at 2:16 a.m. Monday,” Oct. 27.

People outside the factory reported that a cloud was visible coming from the building well before mitigation spray towers were activated, the NRC reported. Indeed, the United Steel Workers posted a video online that shows clouds of gas billowing from the building for six long minutes before fire hoses were used to douse the plume.

Honeywell and the NRC claim that the gas spewing from the Feed Materials Building was not uranium hexafluoride but hydrogen fluoride gas, produced when UF6 reacts with water or water vapor.

(The Honeywell factory is on the Ohio River just downstream from the notoriously contaminated Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky.)

After interviewing Honeywell employees, reviewing records and examining the affected areas, the NRC concluded:

1) The leaking UF6 vaporized and interacted with moisture inside the Feed Building, which converted it into UO2F2 (a solid form of uranyl fluoride, a yellow powder).

2) The uranyl fluoride was contained within the Feed Building and settled within a few feet of the cold trap leak.

3) The chemical conversion process also produced hydrogen fluoride gas, some of which was visible emanating from the building.

4) A potential violation was identified related to the emergency classification of the event and remains under agency review.

In response to questions raised by community members and the United Steel Workers Union, the NRC said Nov. 14, “[T]he leaking UF6 vaporized and solidified and fell to the floor near the leak inside the [Feed Materials Building]. Note that Honeywell is not a zero release facility. All [radiation] readings taken at the fence line and at the nearest residence were well within Honeywell’s regulatory limits. There are HF and radiation monitors onsite and the readings from them were carefully analyzed by the NRC.”

NRC inspectors concluded that Honeywell failed to recognize that the release of hydrogen fluoride gas warranted an emergency classification of “Alert.” Honeywell eventually agreed to the correction. The NRC also reported that Honeywell “determined that if any hydrogen fluoride travelled beyond their property it would have been of such low concentration as to pose no public safety hazard.” After that the NRC reviewed Honeywell’s calculations on the amount of HF released and its subsequent plume estimate, the agency concluded Honeywell’s assessment “reasonable.”

Since 1958, the Metropolis Works has been the nation’s only uranium conversion factory.

—JL

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Coordinates Needed for Clean-up of Dangerous Sites in Iraq

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense and the State Department on behalf of itself and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) seeking the firing coordinates of weapons used in Iraq that contained depleted uranium.

As the US launches new military actions in the Middle East, the groups say getting information about the military’s use of DU in weaponry and its long-term effects is as urgent as ever. According to “In a State of Uncertainty,” a report by the Netherlands-based organization PAX, Iraq has been subject to the largest use of DU munitions of all areas of conflict and test sites, conservatively estimated to be at least 440 metric tons, though the UN Environment Program has estimated an amount up to five times that based on satellite imagery. Iraqi civilians thought to have been exposed to DU and remaining debris have suffered high rates of cancer and birth defects and US veterans report unexplained illnesses.

“DU is but one example of the toxic legacy left by our wars in Iraq,” said CCR Attorney Jeena Shah. “Veterans who served in Iraq are suffering side effects, while many Iraqis still live surrounded by piles of metal debris left over from the war and with soil and ground water potentially contaminated by DU. The only way to deal with its effects and to ensure it is cleaned up is to have a full accounting of where weapons containing DU were deployed.”

DU is a by-product of enriching uranium and is used in armor-piercing weapons due to its high density. When DU hits a target, its fragments burn and vaporize into a fine dust. If a person inhales, ingests, or is exposed to radiation by DU, radioactive material can be absorbed into the lungs, bone, kidney, skeletal tissue, reproductive system, brain, and other organs. A report recently published by the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons concluded after reviewing approximately fifty peer-reviewed studies on DU that it is clearly a genotoxic agent, known to be involved in the development of cancer and potentially responsible for genetic damage. Some of the wreckage left behind from the war has entered the unregulated trade in scrap metal, sometimes even made into cooking pots. No safe levels of exposure to DU have been established, and researchers advise that all exposure should be avoided.

Said Maggie Martin, Organizing Director of IVAW, “Veterans have been fighting for decades to have our injuries recognized by the US government—from Agent Orange to Military Sexual Trauma. We were promised health care in return for our service, and we deserve to know if we’ve been exposed to depleted uranium. This is an important matter of health for over two million veterans and for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who are experiencing the worst of the toxic legacy of war.”

“Laid to Waste,” a report by Wim Zwijnenburg of PAX, details the difficulty of limiting civilian exposure to DU in the absence of reliable information about locations where it was used and the limited efforts to address the issue.

“In addition to regular bombardment, our country and our communities have been left with a toxic legacy from decades of US war in Iraq,” said Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. “If the US is truly concerned about civilian well-being, it should assist in a full accounting of DU contamination and rigorous study of its health effects by making public the locations where weapons containing DU were deployed.”

CCR and IVAW are seeking this information as part of the Right to Heal Initiative, which they launched together with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq. Visit ccrjustice.org to learn more about the Right to Heal Initiative.

—Center for Constitutional Rights, Sept. 25, 2014

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WIPP Update: More Information Surfaces on  February Radiation Leak at Country’s Only  High-Level Radioactive Waste Repository

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014
By Arianne Peterson

Since Nukewatch’s Fall Quarterly update on the February barrel explosion that caused a radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made by Santa Fe’s New Mexican newspaper have revealed more about the gross negligence that led to the leak, exposing at least 20 workers—and the public—to radiation released from the underground repository.

“Waste Drum 68660”, the barrel that ruptured on Feb. 14 and caused the airborne radiation release, was packed with radioactive waste on Dec. 4, 2013, as part of clean-up efforts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and shipped to WIPP for permanent disposal. As Nukewatch reported in the Summer Quarterly, the barrel was one of many that had been packed with a wheat-based, organic “kitty litter” rather than the clay-based litter that had formerly been used to absorb liquid and neutralize waste in the barrels. Organic material is commonly known among industry chemists to react with the nitrate salts in the waste. Additionally, a WIPP briefing paper obtained by the New Mexican reveals that Drum 68660 contained waste from a batch with an unusually acidic pH of zero. Rather than following the lab’s guidelines and taking time to determine the proper treatment of such acidic waste, the lab’s contractors took shortcuts and added the wrong neutralizer to the barrel. An internal LANL memo from May 21 revealed that the drum’s main ingredients, including the organic litter and the neutralizer, matched the makeup of patented plastic explosives.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) celebrated this 1000th shipment of plutonium-laden weapons production waste to WIPP in 2012, hailing it as a milestone in hurried efforts to pack and remove the waste before the 2014 fire season. LANL photo.

If the lab had labeled Drum 68660 with its true ingredients, it would not have met federal transportation standards to make the 330-mile trip on public roads to WIPP, nor would it have met the repository’s own acceptance criteria. But the documents sent with the drum were deeply flawed, failing to mention anything about the extraordinarily high acidity level or the neutralizer, and mischaracterizing the volatile organic litter, presenting it as the regular, clay-based version. According to the FOIA emails, LANL did not let WIPP officials know about the volatile ingredients described in the May 21 memo until May 27, when someone from LANL leaked the memo to them—presumably out of concern that WIPP was scheduled to send staff underground on May 28 to sample the area where the barrel ruptured.

“I am appalled that LANL didn’t provide us this information!” wrote Dana Bryson, Deputy Manager of the Department of Energy’s field office in Carlsbad, in an email to a WIPP manager sent after she learned of the memo. As a result of the memo leak, the May 28 sampling plan was postponed until May 30—and the LANL-based employee who shared it with WIPP was reprimanded.

When Drum 68660 was packed in December 2013, LANL was under a deadline imposed by New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez, to remove radioactive waste—including gloves, machinery, and equipment from Cold War-era weapons production—from an area called “The Hill” that had been threatened by a fire in 2011. Los Alamos National Security LLC, the consortium of private companies that runs LANL, was rushing to package and ship the waste before June 30, 2014, in an effort to avoid another fire season and to help secure an extension of its $2.2 billion Energy Department contract. (Since the operation of LANL was privatized in 2007, annual compensation for its top executive has tripled to over $1.5 million.) Ironically, of course, the shortcuts the lab took in packaging the waste probably caused the failure and shutdown of the country’s only high-level radioactive waste repository, making it impossible for them to meet the deadline.

Neither LANL nor its waste packaging subcontractor, EnergySolutions, has publicly acknowledged the reason for the change from regular clay-based material to the volatile organic kitty litter used in packing Drum 68660. Internal emails obtained by the New Mexican, however, reveal an explanation that may be shockingly simple: a “typographical error.” A policy manual revision approved by LANL that took effect on August 1, 2012, specifically required waste packagers to “ensure an organic absorbent (kitty litter) is added to the waste” (emphasis added) for drums containing nitrate salts, which react with organic materials. In an email to a colleague, Mark Pearcy, who evaluates waste that is to be stored at WIPP, implied that the policy manual revision accidentally included the word “organic” instead of the intended “inorganic.”

“General consensus is that the ‘organic’ designation was a typo that wasn’t caught,” Pearcy wrote. Oddly, the policy change was made just after a visit made by Governor Martinez to commend LANL for staying on track to meet its waste shipment deadline. In any case, the new policy took effect almost immediately, with waste packagers using wheat-based litter as early as September 2012—meaning that the number of incorrectly labeled drums containing the potentially explosive mixture number up to 5,565.

At the same time LANL was speeding up its packaging process, in 2012 and 2013, it was rebuffing attempts made by the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) to carry out regular inspections and audits to ensure the facility was complying with its state permits. NMED officials claim they were told to stay out of the waste handling facility because they did not have the appropriate training to be around the radioactive waste. On Dec. 6, following a nine-month investigation, NMED announced it had found 13 permit violations at WIPP and 24 at LANL. The state imposed civil penalties in the amounts of $17.6 million and $36.6 million, respectively, on the facilities.

According to the recovery plan released by the Energy Department in September, officials were sending workers into the underground WIPP facility four times a week with plans to resume daily entries. Experts have raised concerns that not only are other mislabeled barrels with dangerous ingredient combinations still remaining in the site, but temperatures in the storage area following the rupture of Drum 68660, which reportedly soared to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, may have made their contents even more volatile. Though WIPP operators assure workers the facility is safe for them to enter, they have not responded to requests from the workers’ union to provide safety reports that include the detailed risk and radiation measurement numbers.

Official estimates on the cost of the clean-up at WIPP, which experts have called conservative, are around $500 million. With 5,564 more potentially explosive radioactive waste barrels spread throughout nuclear facilities in the Southwest, no one knows what the negligence of the Energy Department and its contractors will ultimately cost us.

—Albuquerque Journal, Nov. 13 & Dec. 6; New Mexican (Santa Fe), Nov. 15 & 29, 2014

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Chronicling the Plume: Fukushima’s Boundless Fallout

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014
Aug. 6: Total melt-through of Reactor 3 admitted

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the wrecked Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex in Japan, has admitted that all the uranium fuel in Reactor 3 melted and burned into the bottom of the reactor’s cement containment vessel. In November 2011, Tepco said it thought 63 percent of the reactor’s 100 tons of uranium had melted through. According to the company’s new estimate, all the fuel burned through the steel pressure vessel, fell to the bottom of the containment and burned over two feet into the concrete, the Japan Times reports. So harrowing is the problem of removing this mass of hot, molten fuel wreckage, that Tepco has said it won’t begin the attempt for seven years, the daily Asahi Shimbun reported Aug. 7.

Aug. 12: Bribes offered to areas to store waste

Japan’s government is offering billions in subsidies to communities that agree to store contaminated soil and debris cleared from areas hard hit with radioactive fallout. Greenpeace said the payments were nothing but bribes.

The government has offered to pay an annual subsidy of $2.8 billion to Fukushima Prefecture, and the towns of Okuma and Futaba, in return for permission to construct temporary radioactive waste dump sites. About 900 million cubic feet of contaminated soil and debris need storage.

Asahi Shimbun reports that, “Funds will also be provided to develop measures to alleviate concerns elsewhere in Japan that farm, forestry and fishery products in Fukushima Prefecture are contaminated with radioactive materials.”

“Alleviating concern” over radiation exposure is cheaper than decontaminating heavily poisoned areas to the exposure standard required prior to the disaster. The subsidy proposal was launched after the failure of a plan to purchase private land for dump sites.

NBC News said Sept. 1 that soil being collected from cleanup sites is now stored in plastic bags in over 600 temporary sites outside the evacuation zones, “raising health and safety concerns.”

Aug. 12: Ice wall may not solve problem

In July workers began inserting 1,550 pipes 100 feet vertically into the ground inland from the reactor complex to form a long cordon around the wreckage—costing $300 million. Coolant fed into the pipes is supposed to freeze the surrounding earth and create a barrier to the groundwater now pouring into the reactor buildings at a rate of 400 tons per day.

Ice walls have never been built on such a large scale. “I’m not convinced the freeze wall is the best option,” said Dale Klein, a former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser to Tepco, Kyodo News reports. “What I’m concerned about is unintended consequences. Where does that water go and what are the consequences of that?”

Sept. 10: First reactor restart said to be safe 

Japanese regulators announced that one nuclear power station is safe to restart, the New York Times reports. All of Japan’s 48 operable reactors were shuttered in March 2011 following Fukushima’s triple meltdowns. Two reactors at the Sendai station, in the far southwest, are the first to be re-certified in spite of operating in a volcanically active area. Actual restart would take months as operators seek local government consent. A final decision will be made by the prime minister. Public opinion is heavily against any Sendai reactor restart as millions of Japanese are deeply skeptical about its safety. On Sept. 24, 16,000 people marched through Tokyo protesting any such restart.

Oct. 2: Public wary of “allowable” radiation doses

Of those surveyed in Japan, 22.5 percent said the government should impose stricter limits for radiation exposures and radioactive contamination of food; 47 percent said they would like to avoid foods with radioactive substances even if the radiation level is below government-set limits. The latest survey by the Consumer Affairs Agency was conducted in August, and surveyed 5,176 adults in 11 prefectures.

Oct. 12: Groundwater contamination jumps after typhoon

The amount of tritium—radioactive hydrogen—and strontium-90 in groundwater samples at Fukushima jumped more than tenfold in October, reportedly because of heavy rain caused by typhoon Phanfone. Some 150,000 Becquerels of tritium per-liter were measured in groundwater taken Oct. 9 from a well near Reactor 2. The figure is a record and over 10 times the level measured the previous week. The amount of strontium-90 also shattered records with a well water reading of 1.2 million Becquerels per-liter, Tepco reported.

Tepco also revealed that, at a separate well also east of Reactor 2, groundwater was emitting a record 2.1 million Becquerels of strontium-90-like beta radiation, nearly double the level from a week earlier.

Oct. 15: Contaminated exports raise protest

The Wall Street Journal reports that South Koreans are still leery over contaminated imports from Japan. Residents of Changwon, a city on South Korea’s southeastern coast, staged a rally Oct. 14 at a steel company to protest its import of scrap steel from Japan at the port of Masan. The protesters demanded local steel companies stop importing Japanese steel through seaports that aren’t equipped with radioactive detection devices, such as Masan.

“A case in August, in which imports of scrap steel from Japan were found to contain radioactive material and sent back to Japan clearly shows we’re exposed to a real risk,” said Park Jong-kwon, Chairman of the Masan Changwon Jinhae Korea Federation of Environmental Movements.

Oct. 17: Tepco pretends to de-contaminate water

Asahi Shimbun reports that Tepco has decided to simply pretend it’s had some progress in decontaminating tons of water from its flooded reactors. The paper reports, “Although the water treated with … strontium removal systems alone still needs to be processed … to eliminate additional radioactive substances, Tepco officials said the company will temporarily deem such water as being ‘purified’ to achieve its initial goal of completing the processing work by the end of the fiscal year.”

Oct. 29: Radioactive soil stored at schools has nowhere to go

Japan Times reports that tons of contaminated and bagged up topsoil that was removed from school yards will have to stay where it is rather than be shipped to temporary dumps—because of a technicality. The soil was removed before a law on radioactive contamination took effect in January 2012, so its shipment off school grounds isn’t covered by the law. The Fukushima Prefecture Government says the delay is discriminatory and has repeatedly called on Tokyo to allow the soil to be shipped to temporary dump sites.

[In this context, thousands of tons of contaminated soil removed from school grounds and other areas have been incinerated in Japan’s ordinary municipal incinerators. Problems with contaminated incinerator ash arose almost immediately. In August 2011, ash with too much radioactive cesium to allow it to be buried has been found at 42 facilities in Tokyo Prefecture, and five other prefectures as well as Fukushima, the Environment Ministry said Aug. 27, 2011. In the summer of 2011, a 16-prefecture survey of 469 incinerator operators in Tohoku and Kanto was reported to a panel of experts at the Environment Ministry which was discussing how to bury incinerator ash and dust with cesium levels above 8,000 Becquerels-per-kilogram.]
Nov. 11: Cesium found in west coast waters

The Oregon Statesman Journal reports that scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found cesium-134 in seawater from Fukushima had reached the California coast. Tepco downplayed the finding saying in a statement, “It has been … expected … that … radioactivity from … the March 2011 accident … would be carried by ocean currents.” The radioactivity found “raises no concern for human or animal health,” Tepco also said.

Less than 2 Becquerels per-cubic-meter of cesium-134 were found in 10 sea water samples taken between Alaska and California by the researchers.

No US agency is testing Pacific waters for radiation from Fukushima, so the Institute took on the task as a public service.

While the Woods Hole report said the contamination was insignificant, cesium persists in the environment for at least 300 years, during which it bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates in aquatic life as it moves up the food chain.

Nov. 15: Greenpeace: Radiation risks understated 

Radioactive “hot spots” are still prevalent across parts of Fukushima Prefecture, according to Greenpeace monitors who surveyed areas contaminated with fallout from the March 2011 triple meltdowns.

In addition to finding hots spots, Greenpeace experts charged that Japanese authorities consistently underestimate both the amount of radioactive contamination and the health risks it carries. The group began monitoring radiation around Fukushima’s reactor wreckage within a few days of the start of the catastrophe and has conducted independent on-site monitoring visits every year since—the most recent between Oct. 24 and 27.

Greenpeace radiation monitor Heinz Smitai, a nuclear physicist, told foreign journalists Oct. 30 in Tokyo that hot spots exist as far as 37 miles from the site of the disaster, Al Jazeera reported. Mandatory evacuation covered only a 12 mile radius.

Japan’s Ministry of Environment disputes Greenpeace’s charge that it underestimates radiation contamination and risks. The ministry claims that radiation in Fukushima has steadily diminished over time.

However, critics charge that government numbers are made up of estimated averages of radiation findings, meaning that individual “hot spots,” like those Greenpeace recorded, would go unreported and unmapped. Individuals near hot spots could be exposed to greater radiation doses than the government “average” estimates over a large area.

The government’s most recent airborne radiation survey was conducted in December 2013. —JL 

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