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May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

IAEA Says Missile Hit Radioactive Waste Area in Kyiv

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John LaForge

The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) February 27 that missiles hit the site of a radioactive waste disposal facility in Kyiv over night, and “there were no reports of damage to the building or any indications of a radioactive release,” IAEA’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement.

The IAEA’s alert then noted that “SNRIU said it expects to soon receive the results of on-site radioactive monitoring.”

The carefully worded report is deceptively telling. It first declared that there are “no indications” and “no reports” of a radioactive release. But this reassurance was given before any data from radiation monitors had been reviewed, making the statement simultaneously true, and completely meaningless.

Bob Alvarez, a former senior advisor and deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Department, and a long-time critic of nuclear reactor operations, reported, “Given that war is raging at or near the Chernobyl reactor site, more than 21,000 waste nuclear fuel assemblies are currently held in a pool inside of a crumbling building. Several waste fuel assemblies are bent, broken, and cracked. Efforts to remove and place the waste fuel into dry storage have stopped. [An additional] 4,000 cubic meters of high-level waste, resulting from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, are stored in shallow, “engineered trenches” that may also be vulnerable to bombing and artillery fire. The loss of water and destruction of the waste fuel pool storage building, or the destruction of any of the trenches holding high level waste, could result in a catastrophic release.”

The Kyiv radioactive waste incident came a day after Ukraine’s SNRIU reported that a similar disposal facility near the north-eastern city of Kharkiv had been damaged, but again “without any reports of a radioactive release.”

Director General Grossi said, “These two incidents highlight the very real risk that facilities with radioactive material will suffer damage during the conflict, with potentially severe consequences for human health and the environment.”

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-5-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-4-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine

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

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

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

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Bills Against High-Level Nuclear Waste Storage in Desert Southwest Face Opposition

Road to Central Waste Facility Still Bumpy

 

Casks for highly radioactive waste reactor fuel rods like this one are not made for transport to a central dumpsite.

 

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
 By Adrian Monty

After rubber stamping the Interim Storage Partners (ISP) Consolidated Interim Storage facility for high-level radioactive waste in Texas last September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is expected to do the same for a proposed New Mexico facility by July. Holtec International, in conjunction with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, has proposed building a Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS) facility in New Mexico. However, it cannot accept any high-level radioactive waste or operate in any capacity until court cases are settled and until the Southwest consents to being the country’s nuclear dumping ground.

This brings into the spotlight the resuscitation of the previously-abandoned Department of Energy’s “consent-based siting process.” To restart the process, the DOE issued a Request for Information, and 140 organizations signed onto a letter opposing the CIS proposals in New Mexico and Texas. If true consent-based siting is enforced, any state that would host the nuclear waste site must approve the project before it can operate.

The dump proposals are being opposed with both protest and litigation. Major lawsuits have been filed in three U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, the Washington, DC Circuit, the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, and the 10th in Denver. The groups Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, and Sierra Club, have each filed appeals against both CIS facilities. So too have the States of Texas and New Mexico, the Fasken Land and Mineral, Company Ltd., and the Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners Association.

On Sept. 10, 2021, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly adopted a prohibition against storage or disposal of high-level waste in the state. Two bills in New Mexico’s legislature against issuing permits to the waste facility were tabled in February in spite of tremendous popularity.

Supporters of a license denial bill, like state Senator Jeff Steinborn, said the risk of radiation exposure to New Mexicans is too great. The bill’s opponents, including Carlsbad, New Mexico mayor Dale Janway cite potential economic advantages of the facility, but ignore its inherent dangers. Opposition to the bill is led by industry advertisements that call nuclear power a low-carbon climate change solution.

At the federal level, a bipartisan bill introduced March 2nd in the Senate and the House would prevent private companies building a CIS from receiving certain federal payments — which could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars — until a permanent deep, geologic dumpsite is approved. Because no permanent waste site has been proposed, much less consented to, this bill would halt the CIS proposals for now.

Holtec’s application to the NRC proposes a site able to store 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive waste from U.S. nuclear power reactors. Today there are about 86,000 tons stored at the nation’s reactors.

As advertised, CIS plans are said to be “temporary” facilities, built in the Southwest for commercial radioactive waste fuel in canisters to be transported there from 75 reactor sites across the country, most of which are east of the Mississippi.

The risk of transporting dangerous, high-level radioactive waste through nearly every mainland U.S. state is unprecedented. Not only would the waste be a danger to the truck, train and barge haulers, but also to people in cities, villages, and farms along every road, rail, and waterway it passes. Recently, the NRC began discussing preparedness for the mass transport of this waste. (See page 9.)

The “interim” component of this proposal is an additional danger. If this is approved as such, the high-level radioactive waste could potentially be transported a second time once a permanent facility is approved and operational. On the other hand, the interim storage facility could turn permanent if no permanent site becomes available.

Nuclear fuel waste remains dangerously radioactive for millions of years. How can anyone ensure a facility to hold something so dangerous for such an ineffable amount of time?

In all actuality, nowhere is a good place to store all of this waste. The production of radioactive waste through use of nuclear energy must be stopped and in most cases, until there is a better answer, the safest bet is in hardened on-site storage.

— Adrian Monty works with the Oregon State University Downwinder Project. She is an environmental journalist with a focus on atomic issues.

http://archive.beyondnuclear.org/centralized-storage/2022/2/7/updates-on-various-federal-appeals-court-cases-opposing-cisf.html

 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

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