Radioactive Waste

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Elected Officials Slam Canadian Radioactive Waste Dump Plan

More than 100 Great Lakes mayors and elected officials want the Canadian government to say ‘No’ to a plan to bury radioactive waste within one mile of Lake Huron at the Bruce Nuclear station in Kincardine, Ontario.
The officials from both sides of the US-Canadian border slammed Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) plan in a Nov. 30, 2017 letter to Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna. McKenna has twice pushed back against OPG’s proposal, demanding extensive and more detailed answers to questions about the advisability of the near-lake location.

The open letter from mayors said OPG’s proposal to bury the waste so near Lake Huron “threatens the water supply of 40 million people” and notes that 230 resolutions having been passed by local, county and state governments representing over 23 million people opposing the construction of the dump.

Traverse City, Michigan Mayor Jim Carruthers who signed the letter, told Michigan Public Radio, “We know that there are other available sites in Canada that could house this kind of waste that are not so close…. That’s why I speak out for our environment and for our fresh water.”

The letter to McKenna is the latest in a series of efforts to oppose OPG’s plan by citizen groups and more than 200 local governments on both sides of the border in the Great Lakes area. Forty-six of the 104 signers of the letter were Michigan elected officials.

The letter said in part, “We find it irresponsible and deeply troubling that OPG failed and continues to refuse to investigate any other actual sites for its proposed nuclear waste repository despite being required to do so under regulatory guidelines and further as required by you in your Feb. 18, 2016, request.”

—Michigan Public Radio; and “Open Letter,” from 104 mayors to Minister McKenna, Port Huron, MI Times Herald, Nov. 30, 2017

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“It’s a Cover-Up, Not a Clean-Up” Nuclear Waste Smolders Across the United States

By Daniel Ross

Editor’s note: The much-longer original version of this article written for Truthout, March 30, 2017, was edited for space by Arianne Peterson.

The covert project to create the world’s first atomic weapon during WW II, coupled with the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War era, has left a trail of toxic and radioactive waste at sites across the nation that will necessitate, by some margin, the largest environmental cleanup in the nation’s history. The amount of money that has been poured into remediating the waste already is staggering. Still, it appears that the scale of the problems, and the efforts needed to effectively tackle them, continue to be underestimated by authorities responsible for their cleanup.

Since 1989, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management—the agency charged with cleaning up “legacy” radioactive waste—has spent over $164 billion disposing of nuclear waste and contamination. And yet between 2011 and 2016, the DOE’s Environmental Management liability grew by roughly $94 billion.

On Feb. 14, 2014, a drum of plutonium waste exploded underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Dispersed plutonium poisoned 22 workers internally. On May 30, 2014, observer teams took samples from the damaged drum. Dept. of Energy photo.

While cleanup coffers have generally shrunk, the amount of money funneled into refurbishing the nation’s nuclear arsenal has increased markedly. The US is already slated to spend approximately $1 trillion on a nuclear armament modernization program over the next 30 years. The fight over what the final budget will look like has only just begun. But beyond these hovering questions is something much more concrete: the sheer magnitude of the legacy waste problem.

Hanford: Beset with Costly Overruns

Hanford, Washington, is a Manhattan Project era facility perched on the lip of the Columbia River, and the scene of the largest single radioactive remediation in the US. Last year, the DOE championed “20 successful years” of environmental cleanup at Hanford, which was decommissioned in the 1980s. Fifty-six million gallons of toxic waste were subsequently stored in 177 large tanks, some of which have leaked high-level radioactive sludge into the environment. The cost for treating this waste alone now sits at $16.8 billion. The projected cost of cleaning the rest of the facility? $107.7 billion. That’s not all. At least a million gallons of radioactive waste have leaked into and polluted the waters of the Columbia River, contaminating fish eaten by Indigenous people in the area, and threatening drinking water supplies for communities down river.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee: “70 Years of Neglect”

The DOE’s 33,500-acre Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee was a uranium processing facility during the Manhattan Project. It has since been divided into three major cleanup sites. Still active, Oak Ridge is perhaps most notorious for widespread mercury pollution. The DOE estimates that roughly 700,000 million pounds of mercury stemming from the plant has contaminated the soils, and surface and ground waters both on and off the base, for decades.

The sheer breadth and complexity of the remaining problems at Oak Ridge splinter opinions as to what most urgently needs to be addressed. “They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but what happens when every wheel on your giant 18-wheeler is squeaking?” asked Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance. He said that multiple administrations have failed to address the problems at Oak Ridge: “This is 70 years of contamination matched by 70 years of neglect.”

Los Alamos National Lab

The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the site where the nuclear devices used in the first atomic tests of 1945 were made. A 46-page DOE cost estimate published last year lists 17 separate areas scattered throughout the 38 square-mile Los Alamos site still to be tackled, including unlined disposal pits, leaking underground storage tanks, polluted hillsides and canyon bottoms, waste landfills and old contaminated buildings.

Last year’s report estimates that the cleanup will be finished between 2035 and 2040 at a projected additional cost of $3.8 billion, and some consider that number on the conservative side.

West Lake, Missouri: “It’s Pretty Devastating”

In North St. Louis County, Missouri, West Lake landfill holds roughly 45,000 tons of soil mixed with radioactive Manhattan Project-era waste that was illegally dumped back in 1973. As close as 700 feet from the buried radioactive waste is an underground fire that has been slowly smoldering for at least six years.

“It’s pretty devastating,” said Dawn Chapman, who lives near the landfill. “It shakes your faith in your government. When you think about the Manhattan Project, you don’t think about living less than two miles from what is probably the world’s biggest serial killer.”

Critics are pressing for the US Army Corps of Engineers to take over responsibility for the cleanup from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Until then, many are concerned about Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the EPA by around 31 percent.

Concerns About the Future

Hanford, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and West Lake provide only a snapshot of the wider picture. Consider the Rocky Flats Plant, a former nuclear weapons production site not far from Denver, Colorado. Rocky Flats wasn’t used to manufacture nuclear weapons until the Cold War era, but it’s still a glaring example of the pervasiveness of the nation’s ongoing nuclear headache.

Officially, the cleanup at Rocky Flats was finished over 10 years ago, at a total cost of $7 billion. It has frequently been championed as a success story. But some experts are concerned about plutonium that remains buried there. “It’s a cover-up, not a cleanup,” said former Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments member Mary Harlow. In particular, advocates are concerned about plutonium buried on a “wildlife refuge” that has now been opened to the public. “It’s just too dangerous for people to go walking around out there,” Harlow said.

For Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, any increased spending on the nuclear modernization program at active facilities like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has even more troubling implications.
“We’re on an extremely dangerous trajectory,” Kelley said. “We’re on a slippery slope to a new nuclear arms race.”

—Daniel Ross is a Los Angeles-based journalist.

November 3, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power: Throwing Gas on the Fire of Climate Change

Novelist Gwyneth Cravens lectured at the College St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn. last week, plugging a 2007 book that beats the dead horse of using new nuclear power reactors as a way to fight climate change. With five novels under her belt, Cravens’ “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” (2007), is yet another fiction that imagines nuclear power is safe and a future means of easing climate chaos.

Cravens’ assertion that nuclear reactor designs can cut carbon emissions is specious, since it ignores the CO2 produced by uranium mining, milling, transport and fuel rod fabrication; the thousands of billions of gallons of cooling water returned hot to rivers, lakes and seas; the carbon fuels burned during reactor construction, decommissioning, waste management; and the ozone-depleting CFCs emitted from uranium fuel fabrication factories in Kentucky and Tennessee (the only industry to win an exemption from the CFC ban). Cravens and the rest of the industry lobby make sure not to draw attention to the carbon burned for thousands of years packaging high-level waste and shipping it again and again to “temporary” dump sites. The worst failing of Cravens’ science fiction is the demonstrated mathematical impossibility of expanding nuclear power fast enough to fight the climate crisis; that and the fact that investing in new reactors steals resources from safer and cheaper systems that go on line faster. In respect to her 7-year-old story, I dug up a 7-year-old reply.

PETER BRADFORD: In “Why a Future for the Nuclear Industry Is Risky,” Peter Bradford, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, declares, “the claims that nuclear power is a necessary energy source for displacing greenhouse gasses haven’t convinced investors that new nuclear power reactors will be safe and profitable investments.” Bradford’s list of reasons to reject nuclear power is startling: investing in new nuclear reactors remains very risky; Wall Street has expressed serious concerns; nuclear power reactors are stated terrorist targets; nuclear power will not reduce foreign energy dependence [most uranium comes from Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia]; permanent storage of high-level waste remains unresolved; global warming increases the risks of operating reactors vulnerable to heated water unable to cool the core. (Peter Bradford and David Schlissel, “Why a Future for the Nuclear Industry Is Risky,” January 2007, 9 pages, http://a4nr.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Nuclear-Power-is-Risky-report.pdf)

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: A 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, “The Future of Nuclear Power,” noted that a “global growth scenario” of a base load of 1,000 gigawatts of installed capacity around the world by 2050, “would require a new 1,000 megawatt reactor to come on-line somewhere in the world every 15 days on average between 2010 and 2050.” (Brice Smith, “Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change,” 2006, pp. 5-10.)

GREENPEACE: Greenpeace International’s “Nuclear Power Undermining Action on Climate Change” (Dec. 2007), concludes not only that new reactor construction cannot be done soon enough to help, but that money devoted to nuclear power “deprives real climate solutions of funding.” Greenpeace found that, “Even if today’s currently installed nuclear capacity was doubled; it would lead to reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of less than 5 percent and would require one new large reactor to come on-line every two weeks until 2030. An impossible task…” In stark contrast, “Proven renewable energy techniques are available now, can be constructed and brought on-line quickly and provide immediate cuts in greenhouse gases.”

There is an investment choice to be made. “The investment required to double global nuclear capacity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by less than 5 percent, would be between two and three trillion dollars.” Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute calculates, “Each dollar invested in electric efficiency displaces nearly seven times as much carbon dioxide as a dollar invested in nuclear power, without any nasty side effects.” (Greenpeace International Briefing, “Nuclear Power Undermining Action on Climate Change,” December 2007; 7 pages, http://a4nr.org/library/globalwarmingclimatechange/12.2007-greenpeace [scroll down to “PDF Nuclear power”])

INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH (IEER): Physicist Arjun Makhijani, IEER’s president and author of Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, says, “A technological revolution has been brewing in the last few years, so it won’t cost an arm and a leg to eliminate both CO2 emissions and nuclear power.” Dr. Hisham Zerriffi, an expert on electricity grids at the University of British Columbia, says, “What is really innovative about this ‘Roadmap’ is that it combines technologies to show how to create a reliable electricity and energy system entirely from renewable sources of energy.”

According to the Roadmap, North Dakota, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska each has wind energy potential greater than the electricity produced by all 103 U.S. commercial nuclear power reactors. The Roadmap recommends a “hard cap” on CO2 emissions by large fossil fuel users (more than 100 billion Btu per year). “The cap would be reduced each year until it reaches zero in 30 to 50 years. There would be no free emissions allowances, no international trade of allowances, and no offsets that would allow corporations to emit CO2 by investing in outside projects to reduce emissions. The emissions of smaller users would be reduced by efficiency standards for appliances, cars, homes and commercial buildings.” (Arjun Makhijani, “Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, Institute for Environmental and Energy Research with Nuclear Policy Research Institute, June 2007. See 23-page summary at ieer.org/carbonfree

PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: In “Dirty, Dangerous & Expensive, The Truth About Nuclear Power” (Sept. 2006), the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize-winning PSR, says, “Given the urgent need to begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, the tremendously long lead times required for the design, permitting and construction of nuclear reactors renders nuclear power an ineffective option for addressing global warming. … Were an accident to occur [like the July 16, 2007 Japanese earthquake that shutdown three reactors, or the 2011 triple meltdown at Fukushima], it is likely that any planned nuclear power plants would be scrapped…. When the very serious risk of accidents, proliferation, terrorism and nuclear war are considered, it is clear that investment in nuclear power as a climate change solution is not only misguided but also highly dangerous.” (Physicians for Social Responsibility, “Dirty, Dangerous & Expensive: The Truth About Nuclear Power,” Sept. 2006, 4 pages, http://www.psr.org/resources/dirty-dangerous-and-expensive-the-truth-about-nuclear-power.pdf)

OXFORD RESEARCH GROUP (ORG): In their June 2007 report “Too Hot to Handle: The Future of Civil Nuclear Power,” the London-based think tank ORG analyzed the environmental and security risks of relying on nuclear power. The study concludes that, “For the nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism risks to be worth taking, nuclear power must be able to achieve energy security and a reduction in global CO2 emissions more effectively, efficiently, economically, and quickly than any other energy source. There is little evidence to support the claim that it can.” (Frank Barnaby and James Kemp, Oxford Research Group, “Too Hot to Handle: The Future of Civil Nuclear Power,” July 2007, 22 pages; http://www.nuclearconsult.com/docs/information/proliferation/TOOHOTTOHANDLE.pdf )

Member of Parliament David Howarth notes in the study’s foreword that, in Britain, “the potential for renewable power vastly exceeds current electricity consumption.” Like other analysts, ORG noted the impossibility of building enough reactors soon enough to reduce greenhouse emissions. After considering population growth and the parallel growth in electricity demand, the team found that “nearly four new reactors would have to begin construction each month from now until 2075” around the world. The authors point out that “In the UK it is expected to take at least 17 years from licensing to generating electricity.” Furthermore, “Between 1977 and 1993, 58 nuclear power reactors came into operation at an average of 3.4 reactors per year.” The study concludes, “A civil nuclear construction and supply program on this scale is a pipe dream.” — John LaForge

October 18, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Moving Nuclear Industry Trash: Yucca Mountain and Parking Lot Dumps Eyed by Congress

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Kelly Lundeen

The mega energy corporations that own and operate US nuclear reactors have been waiting since 2010 for another opportunity, such as the current political moment, to rid themselves of a million-year liability, over 70,000 tons of high-level radioactive reactor fuel waste. Owners of the 72 reactor sites assume responsibility for their own potential Fukushima-level disaster, terrorist target, or the fuel waste pools filling up (forcing them to shut down), until the US government takes it off their hands.

The nuclear industry is convinced that restarting the licensing process for a permanent waste repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, is the fastest way to be relieved of the waste. In addition, congress and industry are pursuing authorization for the first-ever temporary parking lot dumps, referred to as “consolidated interim storage,” while Yucca Mountain clears a few hundred legal hurdles. The political will to attempt this did not exist until recently, and in June HR 3053 was introduced in Congress.

The same roadblocks that stopped the Yucca repository licensing process in 2010 still exist today, but the industry and the politicians it supports are pressing forward. The indigenous Western Shoshone have always opposed the targeting of Yucca Mountain, which is their land and was never ceded to the United States government. The corporate parking lot dumps target low-income and Latino residents in Texas and New Mexico.

These communities and anti-nuclear groups aren’t the only ones publicly objecting to HR 3053. It has elicited opposition from Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, a Trump-appointee, who warned about the proximity of proposed waste transport routes to the Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range. Prior to becoming Air Force Secretary, Heather Wilson was president of South Dakota School of Mines and pushed for a contract with the Department of Energy to conduct a Deep Field Borehole Test to store radioactive waste in South Dakota. It appears that she knows enough about the dangers of radioactive waste that she doesn’t want it near volatile jet fuels or explosives.

Representative John Shimkus of Illinois, who introduced HR 3053 in June seems to have a different motive for not wanting waste nearby. Illinois has six active nuclear power reactors—all run by Exelon—producing high-level waste. According to OpenSecrets.org, Exelon has contributed $112,000 to his campaign, making the corporation his second biggest contributor. Rep. Shimkus has received another $20,000 since 2010 from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s top lobbying arm.

As it stands now, the legislation could move ahead in the House. Although it was approved with no funding in a Senate committee, spending discrepancies could be reconciled in a House-Senate Conference Committee. A secret vote by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed in August, two months after it was taken, approved the use of $110,000 to continue the information-gathering process to study Yucca Mountain. The vote was registered in June before any related legislation had been introduced in Congress. In the rush to relieve the nuclear power giants from their responsibility of taking out their own trash, the industry and its paid-off politicians will press ahead unless regulations or continued popular opposition gets in their way.

For information on how to resist, see: the “Don’t Waste America” campaign of Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

— Sources: NIRS, Beyond Nuclear, Aug. 10, 2017; Native Sun News Today, Feb. 15, 2017; FollowTheMoney.org; and OpenSecrets.org; StarTribune, March 5, 2017

October 17, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

A Uranium Mining Test for the EPA: Stronger Water Projections Needed, not Weaker

Another test of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its anti-environmental chief Scott Pruitt is underway, and the result will trumpet the agency’s uranium footprint for decades to come. Will EPA’s Congressional mandate be replaced by Everybody’s Poison Adventures?

Now a proposed EPA rule change could put the uranium industry “on a path to a full accounting of the environmental harms and costs of the nuclear fuel chain,” writes Geoff Fettus, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which submitted 60 pages of technical and legal comment on the proposed rules. The comment period just ended, and more than 44,000 citizens and groups weighed demanding justice for the affected communities and long-term protections from future mining.

The rule changes, titled “Health and Environmental Protection Standards for Uranium and Thorium Mill Tailings,” regard water quality, clean-up requirements, and new mining practices. First proposed late in the Obama Administration, a revised set of rules put up by EPA’s Pruitt and Co. weaken protections to groundwater included in the first proposal. The weaker rules would shorten the duration of long-term monitoring after mining concludes, and the lower standards for setting original baseline groundwater quality.

Communities and drinking water across the western U.S., from Texas to Wyoming, have for 70 years been contaminated by uranium mining. Uranium is a natural radioactive and toxic heavy metal, and there are some 15,000 abandoned uranium mines and mills in the west, mostly located on Native North American Indian Reservations. Mountains of abandoned uranium ore tailings, some 190 million metrtic tons at licensed mill sites,* have been left in the open air.

Since uranium mining is mostly done in dry, windy desert areas, radioactive dust is easily dispersed by winds and rains. Surface and underground waters are then contaminated by uranium and its byproducts including lead 210 and polonium 210. These radioactive materials also accumulate in the plants and sediments of rivers, ponds and lakes.

Uranium mine and mill workers suffer similar illnesses and elevated death rates from cancers, kidney and breathing diseases known to be associated with the radiation and heavy metal toxins released by uranium mining. Yet the polluting companies have done little to compensate sickened workers or clean up their contaminated sites, even after disasters like the worst radioactive spill in U.S. history — the 1979 uranium mine dam collapse on the Navajo Nation near Church Rock, NM that poured 94 million gallons of radioactive waste to the Puerco River, poisoning drinking water in downriver communities.

Current EPA rules for uranium mining endanger public health and the environment, the Defense Council’s Fettus says, because they don’t address “in-situ leaching” (ISL), also known as acid leach mining which employs highly corrosive and deadly sulfuric acid. Fettus wrote in an Oct. 16 letter that “regulations promulgated decades ago did not contemplate ISL uranium recovery and its associated harms,” and are “wholly inadequate to the task of protecting scarce western US groundwater resources.”

Most acid leach uranium mining in the US has taken place in the “inter-mountain west” and new or expanded acid mining is in the works, especially with new EPA chief Pruitt and the president having zero tolerance for pesky safe water regulations. The desert southwest is seeing rapid population growth, prolonged droughts, and simultaneous resource extraction projects (like coal bed methane drilling). All this causes severe competition for surface and underground water which these industries use in great quantities. Permanent contamination — that is, the total loss — of underground freshwater (aquifers) has been caused by acid leach mining and will again, unless stringent rules are adopted and enforced.

Attorney Fettus sounded an alarm in his letter, noting, “Any attempt by EPA, under the administration of industry lobbyist Scott Pruitt, to further weaken the standards violates federal law and contradicts the established science of uranium recovery and its impact on groundwater.” Contact the Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc.org) to amplify your efforts as a water protector.

— John LaForge

* Arjun Makhijani, Howar Hu, & Ketherine Yih, Nuclear Wastelands, The MIT Press, 2000, p. 122.

Nuclear Power: Throwing Gas on the Fire of Climate Change

A Uranium Mining Test for the EPA: Stronger Water Projections Needed, not Weaker

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