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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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How Long Does Reactor Waste Stay Deadly?

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
 “Millions of Years”

From 1982 to 2004, government regulators used 10,000 years as the time-frame required to isolate used nuclear reactor fuel rods from the environment and the water. Since no container system can be shown to be up to this task, waste dump engineers simply plan for limited containment, after which the corrosion of storage casks and the dispersal of their deadly contents are considered inevitable. 

Then a federal appeals court decided 10,000 years is a gross underestimate of the waste’s lethal persistence, and, in July 2004, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Nuclear Energy Institute, Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency that the National Academy of Sciences found “no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years.” The appeals court ruled that “repository performance” must be judged on “a time scale that is on the order of 106 [one million] years.”

One million years (50,000 generations) is an unfathomable concept and the plural “millions of years” is even more mind boggling. News accounts have repeatedly noted that high-level radioactive waste “remains radioactive for millions of years.” (New York Times, “Work is Faltering on US Repository for Atomic Waste,” Jan. 17, and “A Hitch in Plans for Nuclear Posterity,” Feb. 12, 1989). — JL

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Fukushima Waste Water Update

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in August that it intends to use an underground piping system to pump radioactive waste cooling water into the Pacific Ocean. The government’s April decision allowing Tepco to disperse the pollution into the public commons over the next several decades caused an international uproar, with some countries promising to fight the decision in the United Nations, the World Court or perhaps the World Trade Organization. Nuclear watchdogs warned that Tepco’s use of underground pipes to disperse the contaminated waste water allows the dumping to be unregulated and difficult to monitor. — The Guardian, Aug. 26; & Agence France-Presse, Aug. 26, 2021

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Glyphosate, Roundup and  Radioactive Waste 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
By Christine Manwiller

Glyphosate, the ubiquitous agricultural herbicide and main ingredient in Bayer/Monsanto’s “Roundup,” causes deadly environmental and human health problems, and, to add insult to injury, leaves behind tons of radioactive waste. 

Glyphosate contains 18.3% phosphorus, which is produced by extracting it from phosphate ore mined mostly in Florida. The mined phosphate, used largely in fertilizers, produces five tons of radioactive phosphogypsum for every ton of fertilizer. Containing this waste is problematic. Roughly one billion tons of radioactive phosphogypsum waste are kept in two dozen stacks in Florida — a state vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise. Earlier this year the Piney Point phosphate plant near Tampa made headlines when its over-full waste lagoon began spilling over, and threatened to flood the surroundings with contaminated waste water. More than 300 homes were evacuated and 215 million gallons of untreated waste water were pumped from the lagoon into Tampa Bay. 

The hazards of glyphosate exposure are legend. A $10 billion-dollar damage settlement against Bayer in June 2020 is only the latest in a long list. Recent studies show that the poison may “raise the risk of Non- Hodgkin’s lymphoma as much as 41 percent.” Environmental Pollution reports that measurable amounts of glyphosate were found in the urine of infants and children, and, “There is growing evidence linking glyphosate exposure with the epidemic of chronic kidney disease of unknown origin in farm workers in Central America, Sri Lanka, and central India.” Glyphosate in food is just part of its down side. 

— Organic Consumers Association, May 13; The Guardian, Apr. 11, 2021; Environmental Health Journal, Nov. 12, 2020; NPR News, June 24, 2020, EP, Oct. 23, 2019

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Retirement-Age Point Beach Reactors Court Disaster with Sirens Off, Engines Racing

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
 By John LaForge

A change to “emergency response” has been made at the old Point Beach nuclear reactors south of Green Bay. The operator, NextEra Energy Point Beach, has turned off the site’s disaster warning sirens. No more will the familiar wail warn of potentially catastrophic radiation releases or spills from the two reactors — which are 51 and 49 years old.

The siren system has been replaced with what’s called “IPAWS” for Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. NextEra says on its website, “The emergency alert system will broadcast official information on local radio stations. Alerts will be sent to your cell phone. If you have functional needs or do not own a cell phone, contact your emergency management agency to be registered for notification and assistance.”

That is, the system sends disaster warnings only to radios and cell phones. Are yours always on all night? Without sirens to wake sleeping nearby populations in the event of an overnight reactor disaster, potential victims can pretend that accidents only happen in daytime.

A quick search reveals:

  • the 1986 Chernobyl explosions and meltdown began at 1:23 a.m.
  • the 1979 Churchrock, New Mexico, uranium mine waste spill — the largest accidental radioactive material release in US history — broke at 5:30 a.m.
  • the Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, partial meltdown in 1979 started at 4:00 a.m.

Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan is a close watchdog of Point Beach and the 28 other reactors on the Great Lakes. He wrote in an email to Nukewatch, “If they can afford them, I sure hope everyone has their TV, radio, computer, or cell phone on in the middle of the night when the [IPAWS] alarm is sounded.”

The “bathtub curve” is derived from a tub’s cross-sectional shape. It’s a graphic representation of the failure rate of machines or technologies over the system’s operational life. The curve illustrates three periods: 1) the high failure rate of start-ups known as early failures; 2) the reduced failure rate of mid-life, known as random failures; and 3) an increasing failure rate due to aging known as wear-out failures. Failures and accidents during the wear-out period become increasingly more likely with age.

Paul Gunter, at Beyond Nuclear in Takoma Park, Maryland, specializes in reactor hazards and operations. He wrote in an email, “Removing the audible stationary sirens from within the emergency planning zone will significantly diminish the reactors’ early warning notification system and the radiological defense-in-depth strategy.”

Gunter points to the “bath tub curve” depicting failure rates over time in systems from toasters to nuclear reactors. “At startup, high rates of failures result from design flaws, mis-assembly and defects. A period of stable operations ensues, but over time, the aging of systems, structures and components leads to material degradation and a steeper rate of failures,” Gunter wrote.

In 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted NextEra’s request to give the old reactors 20-year license extensions, letting them rattle and hum until they’re 60. In November 2020, NextEra applied for a second extension that, if granted, would allow its two reactors to churn out radiation until they’re 80 years old. Adding even more risk to the reactors’ “golden years,” NRC in 2011 approved a 17 percent increase in power output from both units. These changes to original design and engineering limits are akin to dear old gramps gunning the engine of his vintage jalopy with the lousy breaks, racing down main street and running red lights with the whole family involuntarily along for the ride.

Tragic warning from Germany

Germany’s deadly flooding in July with at least 210 fatalities is a tragic example of how retiring warning sirens can be catastrophic.

In some towns sirens failed when the electricity grid crashed, and elsewhere there were no sirens at all, the Los Angeles Times reported July 24. (“Residents of flood-stricken German towns say they got inadequate warning of deluge”) The German daily Badische Neueste Nachrichten reported August 6 that sirens were removed in many places or weren’t working. There had been some 80,000 sirens across Germany when the Cold War ended, but in the 1990s the federal government handed responsibility over sirens to local communities and, in cost-cutting steps, thousands of them, many in the flooded areas, then halted their regular maintenance or removed sirens altogether. In 2015, Germany’s Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance said only 15,000 sirens still existed, Germany’s N-TV reported July 9.

Second only to the endless hazards of radioactive waste, disaster response preparedness has always been the bane of nuclear power systems — the only industrial machines required to have evacuation plans prior to start-up. Taking down warning siren systems only increases the likelihood of catastrophe. Running old reactors harder and without sirens amounts to reckless endangerment.

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