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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

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Shorts

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
Shorts compiled by Christine Manwiller, Beyond Nuclear, Andrew Cockburn and John LaForge.

 

Scientists & NGOs to Biden: ‘Get Rid of ICBMs’

Almost 700 award-winning scientists have urged President Biden to cancel the $246 billion Air Force program to replace today’s 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to “consider eliminating silo-based” missiles altogether. The Minuteman IIIs are the subject of Nukewatch’s 1988 book Nuclear Heartland, and its 2015 Revised Edition, which long ago made the case for abolition. Dated Dec. 16, 2021, the letter’s signers include 21 Nobel Laureates, who note that ICBMs are the nuclear weapons most vulnerable to being attacked and are also the ones most likely to be launched first — perhaps in response to a false alarm. The scientists’ letter neglected to mention that ICBM launch control crews and their commanding officers have been scandalized in the 2010s by convictions and expulsions in cases of domestic violence, drug trafficking, corruption, cheating on Air Force exams, and cover-ups. The open letter was followed a month later by a group of sixty U.S. nongovernmental organizations that issued “A Call to Eliminate ICBMs,” calling them a colossal waste of money and a threat to civilization. The January 12 declaration, organized by Roots Action and Just Foreign Policy, said “There is no more important step the United States could take to reduce the chances of a global nuclear holocaust than to eliminate its ICBMs.” 

— Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, and Roots Action, Jan. 12, 2022; Sputnik International, Dec. 18, 2021; and New York Times, Dec. 16, 2021

Santa Susana Meltdown Worst Ever in U.S.

The Sodium Reactor Experiment was operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, about 18 miles northwest of Hollywood. Andrew Cockburn reported on the little-known radiation hot spot near Los Angeles in his cover story in the January 2022 Harpers, “Spent Fuel: The risky resurgence of nuclear power.” This is a short excerpt: In July 1959, “the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history. The amount of iodine-131 alone spewed into the southern California atmosphere was two hundred and sixty times that released at Three Mile Island, which is generally regarded as the worst ever U.S. nuclear disaster.* None of this was revealed to the public, who were told merely that a ‘technical’ fault had occurred, one that was ‘not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions.’ As greater Los Angeles boomed in the following years, the area around the reactor site — originally chosen for its distance from population centers — was flooded with new residents. No one informed them of the astronomical levels of radioactive contaminants seeded deep in the soil.” 

* Editor’s note: Worse than Three Mile Island was the 1979 Church Rock, New Mexico uranium mill collapse that released to the Puerco River over four times the estimated dispersal of radiation from TMI.

Report: New Small Reactor Design “too late, too expensive, too risky, too uncertain”

A new type of nuclear reactor that would provide electricity to at least four states in the Western U.S. poses financial risks for utilities and their customers, according to a report released Feb. 17 by the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The project’s owner and the company developing the reactor immediately criticized the report, which said the small modular nuclear reactor being developed by NuScale Power in Oregon is “too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain.” The NuScale design is the only small-scale reactor to win approval so far from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is poised to issue a rule this summer that would fully certify it. The report from the IEEFA says it’s likely the NuScale reactor will take longer to build than estimated and that the final cost of its electricity will be higher than anticipated and greater than the cost of power from renewables.

— AP, Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb. 18; IEEFA Report, Feb. 17, 2022 

China to Sign Southeast Asia Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty

China could become the first nuclear weapon state to sign the Bangkok Treaty which establishes a nuclear weapon-free zone in Southeast Asia. On Nov. 22, 2021, President Xi Jinping announced his intention to sign the agreement, which entered into force in 1997 after being signed by all ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. China’s support for the Treaty could be a political response to the new “AUKUS” alliance between the U.S., Britain, and Australia, under which the U.S. and Britain have agreed to equip Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. (See Winter 2021-22 Quarterly) Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi criticized news of the submarine construction plan calling it a threat to the efforts of the Bangkok Treaty to create a nuclear-free zone. According to Dr. Ryan Musto, a Fellow with the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the U.S. should consider joining the Treaty with a stipulation regarding articles it would not obey. Otherwise, Musto wrote for Lawfareblog.com, certain “submarine patrols would be outlawed,” because “under the treaty, the U.S. would be unable to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against an enemy vessel within the zone. It also would be unable to use a nuclear-armed submarine within the zone to attack a target elsewhere.” The Treaty zone covers the territories, continental shelves, and “exclusive economic zones” of the countries that have had it ratified. 

— Center for Air Power Studies, Jan. 7, 2022; Lawfareblog.com, Dec 9, 2021; CISAC, Dec 9, 2021; Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Bangkok Treaty”

Sea Monsters Multiplying

China is now the third country to invest in floating nuclear reactors, after the U.S. and Russia. The 30,000-ton reactor ship ACPR50S may be completed this year, the South China Morning Post said, and could be the first in a fleet. The reactors have been touted as means of reducing China’s carbon footprint, EurAsian Times reports, but they are headed to China’s east coast to power oil rigs! Russia launched the Akademik Lomonosov in December 2019, the first floating double nuclear reactor to be built since the 1960s. Nukewatch and others condemned the overwhelming dangers involved which we called “reckless endangerment of the public commons.” The most obvious risk is capsizing, especially considering the increasing intensity of storms caused by climate change. Ship engineers behind the program claim that the reactor can withstand hurricane-force winds, but they admit that the “ship body must not capsize under any circumstances.” This would lead to a loss-of-coolant and meltdown, which would devastate sea life and nearby coastal areas. Chris Gadomski, a nuclear analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told the Guardian, “It wasn’t so long ago that the Philippines was the site of a major tsunami, and I don’t know how you would hedge against a risk like that.” Jan Haverkamp, with Greenpeace, said floating reactors combine “all of the flaws and risks of larger land-based nuclear power stations” with “extra risks from the unpredictability of operating in coastal areas and transport over the high seas — particularly in a loaded state,” the Guardian noted. 

—EurAsianTimes, Dec 15, and South China Morning Post, Dec. 14, 2021; the Guardian, Dec 17, 2020; and Nukewatch Quarterly, July 2018.

U.S. Regulators Reject Application to Build and Operate ‘Micro’ Reactor

On January 6, 2022, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff denied the small start-up Oklo Corporation’s application for a “novel” combined “construction and operating license” for what Beyond Nuclear called an “atomic power cathedral in the woods” at the Idaho National Laboratory. The NRC’s denial was based on plain insufficiency in the details Oklo presented for its “Aurora micro-reactor.” Beyond Nuclear, in Tacoma Park Maryland, with the support of a coalition of safe energy and environmental advocate groups including Nukewatch, had petitioned to intervene in the sketchy reactor design last year but were denied intervener status by the NRC ,which called the petition “premature.” It would have saved staff time and taxpayer money to have scrapped Oklo’s application as the critics requested. — Beyond Nuclear, December 2021

Biden Urges Japan to Shun Nuclear Ban Treaty Meeting

The first “Meeting of States Parties” — countries that have ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) outlawing the “development, testing, possession and use of nuclear weapons” — will take place this June in Vienna. According to U.S. government sources, President Biden has pressured Japan not to attend the meetings. In 2020, the Komeito Party, part of Japan’s coalition government, urged minister of foreign affairs Toshimitsu Motegi to participate as an observer. Biden’s pressure follows Germany’s announced intention to participate also as an observer, making it the only country that hosts nuclear weapons to do so, although both Germany and Japan have parroted the U.S. government’s rejection of the TPNW. Prime Minister Fumio Mishida has “no concrete plans” to join the Vienna meeting, according to a statement made last December. Biden’s action recalls the Trump White House’s attempts in October 2020 to force parties to the treaty to withdraw their ratifications. “That the Trump administration is pressuring countries to withdraw from a UN-backed disarmament treaty is an unprecedented action in international relations,” said Beatrice Fihn of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “That the U.S. goes so far … shows how fearful they are of the treaty’s impact and growing support.” To date, 59 countries have ratified the TPNW and 86 have signed, although none of the nuclear weapons states have done so. — Kyodo News, Feb. 1, 2022; Dec. 27, and 21, 2021; and AP, Oct. 21, 2020

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

May 9, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Cape Cod Bay in the Crosshairs — Holtec’s Reactor Waste Water Threat

By John LaForge

Still dreaming of a nuclear reactor that is clean, safe and cheap? Holtec Decommissioning International Corp. is trying to turn that dream to a nightmare.

The newly minted subsidiary intends to dump roughly one million gallons radioactively contaminated nuclear reactor waste water into Cape Cod Bay, which happens to be a part of the protected Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The million gallons are stagnating in the shutdown Pilgrim reactor’s waste fuel pool, formerly used to cool extremely hot uranium fuel rods which are taken from the reactor core (at around 5,092 degrees Fahrenheit)  when fresh fuel is emplaced.

Holtec’s pollution plan has produced such a tsunami of public opposition that Massachusetts Senator Ed Marky convenes a congressional subcommittee field hearing in Plymouth, Massachusetts Friday, May 6, to air questions about an array of vexing problems with decommissioning the Pilgrim reactor, which is on the northwest shore of Cape Cod Bay. Markey is Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.

Diane Turco is director of Cape Downwinders, a grassroots watchdog group working to protect local communities from the radiation risks created by Pilgrim. The group has helped bring critical attention to Holtec’s scandalous proposal and has organized gut-reaction outrage into a broad-based coalition of resistance that includes the fishing community, the labor movement, the real estate industry, as well as country’s major environmental organizations.

While Markey’s field hearing is being arranged, and Holtec works the bribery zone trying to win support, Turco has had to spend countless hours preparing to defend against trumped-up trespass charges resulting from a tour of the Pilgrim site she gave to a pair of National Public Radio reporters. The charge is crass political harassment, since neither of the reporters were charged, and attorneys have told Turco that a motion to dismiss based on selective prosecution is a no-brainer. But the court has not agreed to hold a motion hearing, so she has to prepare testimony and expert witnesses for a May 9 trial, even though the court could do the right thing and dismiss.

Waste water’s contents still secret

In a phone interview, Turco told me that Holtec has not even made public the radioactive character of the waste water it wants to spew to the public commons. If the state department of environmental protection has been informed, it has not divulged either the sorts of isotopes in the water or their concentration. This secrecy makes impossible an valid assessment of the risks involved and only aggravates public fear and hostility.

“If Holtec had true concern for public health and the environment and worked with transparency as they promised, it would halt any dumping until a viable solution is found acceptable”, Turco told the Cape Cod Times last December. “[D]umping into Cape Cod Bay just highlights the fact that the [US] Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec don’t have a solution for what to do with nuclear waste. Contaminating our environment is …is immoral.”

The thought of Holtec’s river of poison being poured into Cape Cod brings to mind a wartime atrocity like poisoning wells. Holtec says it intends to dilute the radioactive waste water (like Tepco Corp’s plan to pour 1 million tons of radioactive waste water into the Pacific beginning next spring), but this is an irrelevant distraction.

The volume of radioactive chemicals, metals, or isotopes will not be changed or reduced at all by diluting. The same total of radioactive materials and their radioactivity are merely spread through a larger volume of water — all of which will then be poisoned for a very long time. Strontium-90 taints the water for 300 years (ten half-lives); iodine-129 for 160 million years; carbon-14 for 57,000 years. All such cancer-causing radionuclides cio-accumulate and bio-concentrate in the ocean’s web of life and can contaminate seafood like Cape Cod’s famous mussels, clams and oysters — becoming internal radiation emitters.

Last January 12, Sen. Markey and three other members of congress wrote to Holtec opposing the proposed discharge into Cape Cod Bay. The letter encouraged Holtec to consider alternative methods of disposal, none of which are good answers to nuclear power’s endless waste dilemma. Operators of the closed Vermont Yankee reactor shipped its poison water out of state, which moved the radiation risk to someone else’s water table. Evaporation is an option that risks spewing radionuclides on the wind. Nuclear power stories just don’t have happy endings. ####

— A version of this piece ran at CounterPunch (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/06/cape-cod-bay-in-the-crosshairs-holtecs-reactor-waste-water-threat/) May 6-8, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Environmental Justice, Nuclear Power, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column

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