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.

 

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.

Road to Central Waste Facility Still Bumpy

 

 

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