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Minnesota’s Monticello Reactor is Leaking Radioactive Tritium — Like Most in US

By John LaForge

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was notified of a “nonemergency” at the 51-year-old Monticello reactor on the Mississippi River in Minnesota — one of the oldest in the United States and a General Electric unit identical to the three meltdown-destroyed reactors at Fukushima. On Nov. 22, owner Xcel Energy informed the NRC of “an on-site monitoring well that indicated tritium activity above the [Offsite Dose Calculation Manual] … reporting levels.” Translation: Groundwater from a well on company grounds is poisoned with radioactive tritium above permitted levels. The short NRC notice then says “The source of the tritium is under investigation,” although no mention is made of the extent of groundwater contamination, or whether off-site wells have been tested. Without data from groundwater beyond the site’s boundaries, the NRC notice then reaches the unsubstantiated, upbeat conclusion that “there was no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel.” Xcel’s claim recalls the great undersea explorer Jacque Cousteau who said: “A common denominator, in every single nuclear accident — a nuclear [reactor] or on a nuclear submarine — is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, ‘There’s no danger to the public.’ They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt.”

Photo Credit: NRC.gov

— Notification of Environmental Report, NRC Region 3, Nov. 22, 2022

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Nevada Moves to Permanently Cancel Yucca Mt

By Lindsay Potter

Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects and Governor Steve Sisolak have filed a legal motion to put a final nail in the coffin of the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste dump scheme. Though Yucca Mt. was selected in 1987, decades of resistance, damning scientific studies, and vocal bi-partisan opposition have kept it unfinished. The new motion seeks to lift a stay on a court order (State of Nevada v. US NRC) with the hope of moving forward a request by the state Attorney General’s office to reject the license application “once and for all.” The motion cites several blunders by the US Department of Energy (DOE) including: “failure to obtain necessary control over the land surrounding the proposed repository; inability to obtain necessary restrictions on military aircraft over the area; and failure to address human-caused climate change in its licensing application.” DOE and NRC staff have admitted that these failures render the license application “out of compliance” with safety requirements. The AG’s office lists further failures, geographic flaws, fights against the proposal, and the site’s engineering weaknesses on a new website launched as a companion to the motion. Nevada has illustrated the site’s short-comings over the last thirty-five years and demonstrated staunch lack of consent, proving continued pursuit of the Yucca Mt. project would only waste millions of additional tax-payer dollars. If the NRC does not grant the request, Nevada can resort to evidentiary litigation.

— Press release, “Nevada Files Motion Regarding Yucca Mt. Nuclear Waste Project” from NV.gov; and KTVN 2News television report, Sept. 20, 2022

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Hanford Clean Up Hiccups

(https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/hanford-nuclear-site-washington-state-tank-farms-workers-sickened-investigation/281-48a540ea-1fa5-4de9-8ab7-b1dc9db6e5c8) – Photo Credit
By Adrian Monty

Radioactive waste has piled up at the Hanford, in Richland, Washington, since the production of plutonium began there in 1943 for use in the very first atom bomb, code-named “Trinity,” detonated outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the plutonium bomb, dubbed “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

The first round of single-shelled radioactive waste storage tanks on the site began leaking early in the 1950s, prompting the use of double-shelled tanks in the 1960s. These million-gallon tanks, 177 in total, house over 55 million gallons of low- to high-level radioactive waste, are prone to leaking, and are stored in a 150 foot deep football field-sized crater. Since the early 2000s, it has been the goal of the Energy Department to build a Waste Treatment Plant with the capacity to immobilize a large portion of the waste by mixing it with molten glass for permanent storage in a process called vitrification. The DOE’s plan is to start with low-level waste, including liquids separated from high-level radioactive waste in the double-shelled tanks, and to go from there.

On October 8, the 300-ton vitrification melter began heating up, the first step of the process, and the program had its first hiccups. The melter, designed to liquefy glass to be mixed with radioactive waste, is supposed to gradually heat to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit over a period of weeks. In the first attempt, the melter began to overheat, and workers had to halt heating after only two days, to figure out the next steps. The melter was still empty, so there was no danger to workers or the environment. Leaders at the site have acknowledged that this is a first, and they want to make sure the melter can get up to temperature and melt glass mixed with other materials before bringing radioactive materials into the picture. Vitrification has successfully stabilized radioactive wastes in the past but on a much smaller scale.

Meanwhile on August 9, Nagasaki Day, two tribes, nine agencies, and governors Kate Brown of Oregon and Jay Inslee of Washington sent letters to President Biden urging him to expand the budget for cleanup efforts at what has been called “the most toxic place in America.” In October, every Washington State Congressional leader, Democrat and Republican, followed suit with a letter of their own. As we go to print, they are still awaiting a response.

— Hanford Site, 2022; Tri-City Herald, Oct. 9 & 20, 2022; The Spokesman-Review, Oct. 9, 2022

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

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Bribes to Purchase ‘Consent’ for Waste Storage

Rose Gardner lives five miles from one proposed parking lot dump for high-level radioactive waste that has been licensed by the NRC and 35 miles from another awaiting a licensing decision.
By Kelly Lundeen

In September the Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $16 million fund to be distributed to eight communities willing to consider hosting the nation’s 90,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste in a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF). Resembling a bribery scenario, the candidates would likely be placed on a list of future host sites in exchange for the funds. The recipients will be tasked with engaging community stakeholders to inform them about advantages and disadvantages of storing the immensely hazardous waste from nuclear energy production, and exploring technical and geological factors. Awardees are expected to be announced by February of 2023. Yet the federal government appears to give with one hand and take with the other.

While the DOE claims to seek “consent” for the siting of waste storage, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is strong-arming a CISF into Texas with the Interim Storage Partners facility, and into New Mexico with the Holtec International proposal — no matter the resistance.

Rose Gardner, of Alliance for Environmental Strategies, spoke at a congressional briefing last March. “I live five miles from … Interim Storage Partners (ISP),” for which the NRC rubber-stamped a license in September 2021. “I have maintained my opposition against storage of nuclear waste … for many years…. Several communities in New Mexico have passed resolutions against Holtec…. There has never been any consent from the public to store commercial irradiated waste in their state.”

The NRC increased public distrust of its work in a November 3 public meeting about Holtec International’s licensing status. In the meeting NRC project manager Jose Cuadrado reported the submission of 6,600 public comments regarding the CISF Environmental Impact Statement. When he was corrected by Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, Cuadrado was forced to admit that his data had excluded online form-generated comments, and there had been about 50,000 comments, mostly opposing the CISF. Kamps informed the meeting that this was a record-breaking number for the subject matter, and a far cry from “consent.” Additional opposition comes from the Western Governors’ Association, which has passed a resolution banning any of its 22 constituent states and US territories from accepting a CISF without the governor’s consent.

Lawsuits against the NRC’s granting of a license for the ISP facility in Texas have been filed by Beyond Nuclear, Sierra Club, a six-organization coalition headed by Don’t Waste Michigan, and the States of New Mexico and Texas. Oral arguments were heard August 29 in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, and November 10 in the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. The courts’ rulings are pending regarding the alleged illegality of the license under federal law (including the Nuclear Waste Policy Act), and dump promoters’ failure to consider emergency funds required in the event of an accident. The State of New Mexico has also appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

While the DOE gives the appearance of being concerned about “consent” (via bribes), the NRC flaunts its intentions to forge ahead by lying at public hearings and breaking federal laws. Continuing the current licensing process undermines any consent the DOE professes to seek. If the NRC approves the license for Holtec’s CISF, and the facilities begin to operate, Rose Gardner concludes, “I would have a nuclear dump five miles from my home and another nuclear dump 35 miles from my home…. I consider that a grave environmental injustice to my community, to my family, and to this non-consenting state.”
— US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Nov. 10; NRC, Nov. 3; The Paper, Sept. 28; Power Magazine, Sept. 22; US Congressional Briefing, Mar. 31, 2022

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Canadians Resisting High-Level Waste Dump

Deep Geological Repository. Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
By Lindsay Potter

After 10 years, Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) still seeks a “willing” host for the latest planned deep geological repository (DGR), a vault designed to hold over 5.5 million used reactor fuel bundles 2,200 feet below ground for thousands of years. Though there are no DGRs operating currently, the first has been constructed in Finland and potential sites are being surveyed in Switzerland. The NWMO is dangling “job creation” and short-term economic stimulus as boons of the $24 billion project, but environmental groups, concerned residents, and activists decry the threat to watersheds and local health.

The argument over the DGR’s viability is déjà vu for opponents of the similar Ontario Power Generation project, which sought approval for 16 years before scrapping plans in June 2020, capitulating to scientists, community and political leaders, and an overwhelming dissenting vote by the Saugeen Ojibway First Nation.

The newly proposed DGR site in the South Bruce community of 6,000 sits below 1,500 acres of farmland, 25 miles from Lake Huron and 30 miles inland from the Bruce Nuclear Station, where radioactive waste is currently stored in aboveground casks on the lake’s shore. Ignace, the other potential host, is a town of 1,200 in northwestern Ontario roughly 150 miles from Lake Superior on Indigenous treaty land.
The South Bruce community is divided between those against the DGR, largely lead by the group Protect our Waters (POW), and those in the self-titled “willing-to-listen” camp who tow the NWMO’s line that radioactive waste is safe and skeptics are fear-mongers. The latter want to delay a decision in order to learn more about the DGR, contradicting the more than 1,700 signatories to POW’s petition demanding a 2022 referendum. The campaign to persuade local residents features speakers selected by the NWMO who overwhelmingly find DGR and nuclear to be safe “best-practices.” Despite October’s local election of a slate of relatively pro-DGR candidates, including mayor Mark Goetz, there is bi-partisan support for holding a binding community referendum on the question. However, many Canadians and experts stipulate that leaving the decision up to a single provincial township puts tens of millions who rely on the lake for drinking water and southern Ontario for agricultural products at risk without consent, not to mention fails to consider the dangers posed by moving this waste across Canada to its chosen resting spot.

Indigenous activist and author Tanya Talaga describes Ignace-area tribal chiefs’ “vehement opposition” to hosting the DGR on the traditional territories of Treaty 9, Treaty 3, and the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850, on land near the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, in an area also home to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) which represents 49 First Nations in northern Ontario close to the Arctic Watershed. “The NWMO appears to consider ‘agreement’ … to mean a decision made by the few while ignoring the many,” Talaga writes, confirming a “complete lack of consent” among NAN leaders. NAN Grand Chief Derek Fox said “if I have to be the one there, getting hauled away to jail … I will be there to make sure this waste does not enter into our territory.” The NAN chiefs collectively agreed their nations will resort to any means necessary and intend to protest and take legal action. A DGR in Ignace would violate Article 29 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canadian Parliamentarians adopted in 2021, though Ontario refuses to enact matching provincial legislation.

For now, the Canadian nuclear industry seems determined to park its accumulated radioactive waste on the shores of the Great Lakes without regard for redundancies. It is hard to imagine how advocates of nuclear energy can consider this clean or green when the global failure to determine a safe way to store the constantly accumulating waste continues to prove unresolved.

— Bayshore Broadcasting, Oct. 24; London Free Press, Oct. 23; Midwestern Newspapers, Oct. 19; CTV News, Oct. 8; Globe and Mail, Aug. 11, 2022

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