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Plans for Mass Shipments of High-Level Radioactive Waste Quietly Disclosed

BY JOHN LAFORGE, COUNTERPUNCH, JANUARY 7, 2022

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/07/plans-for-mass-shipments-of-high-level-radioactive-waste-quietly-disclosed/

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 years?

Last month US 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 US infrastructure of decrepit of roads, faulty bridges, rickety rails, and rusty barges may not be ready for such an onrush of immensely heavy rad waste casks.

Steel and concrete canisters known as “dry casks” are set outside near nuclear reactors holding the high-level radioactive waste fuel rods that must be containerized for over one million years. The casks are not designed or engineered for trans-shipment to centralized waste dumps. Photo by Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Diane D’Arrigo, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Maryland, and Leona Morgan, with Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico, report for NIRS 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 December 17 with Dorman’s letter, which noted that storage of the waste is now done in cooling pools and/or heavy outdoor casks near the reactors that produce it — at 75 sites across the country.

Radioactive waste storage may be consolidated

Dorman’s letter — unearthed January 4 by Michael Keegan of the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes — reminds us, “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 dump.

Critics of the proposed licensing are demanding that the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board halt the Holtec licensing because it is illegal. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act “only allows the US 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, testing, and mishaps will be required. Government environmental impact statements regarding the 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 Beyond Nuclear. They show cities, states, and congressional districts “potentially affected by shipments,” and are based on DOE plans in 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 Tex-Mex 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 pass through their communities, or to start organizing to stop them. They know there are reasons to protest. The government has notoriously proposed water-borne routes that would see high-level waste casks on barges — a scheme critics call “Floating Fukushimas” or “Edmund Fitzgerald Follies.” The gales of November be damned. ###

—John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

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Study: Contrary to Early ‘All Clear’, California’s Woolsey Wildfire  Dispersed Radioactivity from Contaminated Santa Susana Lab Site

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
From Denise Duffield, PSR Los Angeles; Melissa Bumstead, Parents Vs SSFL; and Marco Kaltofen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

A study published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity finds that radioactive contamination from California’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) was lofted off site during the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which began at SSFL. The study calls into question early and highly implausible claims by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) and its toxics department that no contamination was released.

SSFL is a former testing complex for nuclear reactors and rocket engines located about 30 miles from Los Angeles in hills above the San Fernando Valley. For decades, accidents, spills, and fires at the SSFL, including a partial reactor meltdown in July 1959, resulted in extensive radioactive and chemical contamination that has not been cleaned up. The 1959 fuel melting caused the worst atmospheric release of radioactive iodine-131 in US history, and was the fourth worst in the world after Fukushima, in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Windscale in England.

This photo’s black star shows tracks made by alpha rays emitted from a particle of plutonium in the lung tissue of an ape. Inside the body, alpha rays can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. Photo by Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, 1987.

The study found radioactive particles associated with the fire at SSFL as high as nineteen times background [radiation levels] as much as nine miles away. And it concludes that “some ashes and dusts collected from the Woolsey Fire zone in the fire’s immediate aftermath contained high activities of radioactive isotopes associated with the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. … and confirmed the presence of radioactive micro-particles in the Woolsey Fire-related ashes and dusts.”

The findings contradict conclusions by CalEPA’s Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which, a mere nine hours after the fire began on November 8, 2018, declared that the fire didn’t result in releases of hazardous materials. CalEPA/DTSC issued an interim study in December 2018, affirmed in a final version in December 2020, which asserted that “data from sampling and measurements did not detect the release of chemical or radiological contaminants from SSFL.” The assurances were widely criticized at the time, and the new findings have both disproved them and have reinvigorated widespread concerns about the failure to fully clean up SSFL as long promised.

The new study “Radioactive micro-particles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA” was conducted by Marco Kaltofen of the Dept. of Physics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Maggie and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. It examined 360 samples of household dust, surface soils, and ash from 150 homes and elsewhere, collected from December 2018 to February 2019.

Radioactive micro-particles in ash and recently-settled dusts collected just after the Woolsey fire, were “found in Thousand Oaks, CA, and Simi Valley, CA, about nine and three miles from SSFL, respectively. The Thousand Oaks samples had alpha count rates up to 19 times background,” the study reports. The researchers noted that alpha radiation-emitting thorium was the source of this excess radioactivity. The authors warn of small, dispersed alpha particles because of the “high risk of inhalation-related long-term biological damage from internal alpha emitters compared to external radiation,” the authors report.

Had the state and the parties responsible for the contamination (Boeing, NASA, and the Energy Department) met their legally binding obligations to clean up SSFL by the 2017 deadline, the 2018 fire couldn’t have released contamination. Further failure to clean the site poses continuing risks to the nearby population, warned Congressional and local elected officials in an Oct. 14 letter.

Lawmakers Complain of Clean-up Failure, Delays, and Gutted Decontamination Standards

There is widespread concern among elected officials and the community about secret negotiations between the state and Boeing Corp. that could further delay the cleanup, and allow giant military contractor to walk away from its radioactive and chemical contamination. California Congressional rep’s Brad Sherman, Julia Brownley, Jose Luis Correa, Graciela Flores Napolitano, and US Senator Alex Padilla sent a letter to CalEPA October 14 reminding the agency: “The 2007 Consent Order and 2020 Administrative Orders on Consent … required that soil cleanup be completed by 2017, however the agreed upon soil remediation at the site has yet to begin. We are deeply concerned about the lengthy delays….” In addition, County Supervisors from Ventura and Los Angeles County, six city mayors, and a Los Angeles City Council member wrote October 14 to CalEPA declaring, “We are opposed to any action that would significantly delay or weaken site cleanup.” The officials singled out the state’s failure to enforce the 2007 Consent Order, confidential negotiations between DTSC and Boeing, and potential changes to methodology rules that could delay or weaken clean-up requirements; as well as delays in the Programmatic Environmental Impact Report.

The core of such a Boeing-Newsom Administration deal could allow as much as twenty times higher levels of contamination than permitted currently. CalEPA remains in secret negotiations with Boeing.

“Federally funded studies have previously confirmed that contamination [above] US EPA levels of concern has migrated off site, and that the incidence of key cancers in the neighboring communities increases with proximity to the site,” said Denise Duffield, associate director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles. “In addition, site owner Boeing has been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for exceeding contamination limits in surface water runoff leaving the site over many years. Until [those] responsible for the pollution finally live up to their clean-up agreements, people living around the site will be at further risk to their health,” Duffield said.

“The bottom line is, if SSFL had been cleaned up by 2017 as required by the clean-up agreements, the community wouldn’t have had to worry about contamination released by the Woolsey Fire,” said Melissa Bumstead, co-founder of Parents vs. SSFL. “My daughter is a two-time cancer survivor, and no parent should have to worry that the SSFL might give their child cancer when there’s a fire on site, or when it rains or it’s windy.”

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Ignoring Outcry, Mockery, Japan Intends 2023 Start of Fukushima Wastewater Dumping

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

On October 18, Japan’s Prime Minster Fumio Kishida said there would be no postponement of its plan to pollute the Pacific Ocean with 1.27 million metric tons of radioactive cooling water from Fukushima’s destroyed reactors. Kishida said releasing the “heavily diluted” waste water would begin in the spring of 2023. The dispersal is expected to continue for decades as the accumulation of radioactive cooling water increases by 150 tons every day. The water becomes severely contaminated after being poured over large volumes of roiling, not, melted uranium and mixed uranium/plutonium fuel under Fukushima-Daiichi’s three destroyed nuclear reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi was openly mocked with laughter by the dignitaries at COP26 on November 4. The adamantly pro-nuclear Grossi had said before the large audience, “No one died from radiation at Fukushima,” provoking the laughs. “I don’t know why you’re laughing, it’s a fact,” he griped. Earlier Grossi warmed up the crowd with this thigh-slapper: “We control this activity so it does not cause any harm.” Grossi’s job is difficult since under its United Nations Statute, the IAEA has only one objective: “The Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy … throughout the world.”

Japan’s April decision to further pollute the Pacific caused an uproar in dozens of Pacific rim of countries. South Korean officials denounced Kishida’s declaration the same day, saying that it represents a “grave threat” to the marine environment. South Korea continues to ban seafood imports from the Fukushima region and has repeatedly condemned the dumping plan, which a senior South Korean foreign ministry official said, “could affect our people’s health and security as well as the ocean environment.”

Alternatives to the ocean dumping include long-term tank storage, more thorough filtering, or evaporation, and in 2019 Japan’s own ministry of economy and industry recommended including evaporation in its list of waste water options.

China’s Global Times reported in October that Liu Jiangyong, vice dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, asked if the wastewater will be processed and will have no impact on the marine environment and food web as the Japanese government claimed, why can’t the water be recycled on land? Japan can’t answer any of these questions, said Liu. The ideal plan would be for Japan to process the wastewater to a safe level and recycle it, rather than dump it into the sea, said Liu.

A June letter to Japan’s permanent mission to the United Nations signed by a group of 70 groups, including Nukewatch, warned: “The dumping of radioactive water into the Pacific is also a violation of international law. The 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter and the London Protocol prohibit dumping of any concentration of radioactive material into the sea.”

In May, three human rights experts appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council issued a statement that expressed “deep regret” at Japan’s dumping plan and “reminded Japan of its international obligations to prevent exposure to hazardous substances, to conduct environmental impact assessments of the risks that the discharge of water may have, to prevent transboundary environmental harms, and to protect the marine environment.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), operators of the Fukushima complex, announced August 24 it would construct a tunnel underwater to release the 1.27 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Tepco said it would start building at least one 8-foot diameter half-mile-long tunnel in March 2022 by hollowing out bedrock on the seabed near the No. 5 reactor at Fukushima, Japan Times reported.

Critics around the world immediately denounced the plan as an attempt to avoid any oversight, monitoring, or independent inspection of the radioactive materials in the waste water.

“…to dump it into an ocean, where we share the same tides, current, and fish, it is a level up from urgent for us,” said Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, noting that even basic concerns had not yet been addressed. “Currently we are not satisfied there will be no harm to our Blue Pacific,” he told Civil Beat in September.

A regional collective of young activists called Youngsolwara Pacific has condemned the dumping plan and Japan’s lack of consultation. Likewise, a senior South Korean foreign ministry official told China’s Global Times in October that, “Japan’s decision was made without enough consultations with neighboring nations.” Talei Luscia Mangioni, a researcher at Australian National University and Youngsolwara Pacific member, said “… this is an act of transboundary harm. ” And it is typical, she said, considering the history of nuclear powers that “have treated the Pacific as a sacrifice zone.”

In Iitate village 24 miles from Fukushima’s meltdowns, Nobuyoshi Ito, a former computer engineer, has been measuring the radioactive properties in the food and soil for nearly a decade. Mr. Ito always carries a monitor and is constantly recording radiation levels, “trying to determine what is and isn’t safe to eat, and where it is and isn’t safe to go,” CBS News reported last August. While the town’s evacuation orders are gone, Ito says people — especially children — shouldn’t return. “It will take 300 years to restore the village to its original state, and it will continue to emit radiation for 300 years,” he said.

On September 22, the United States lifted its weak restrictions on imported food stuffs from Japan, and food products free of inspection now include even rice harvested in Fukushima. According to Japan’s farm ministry, the US is the 3d-largest importer of its food products and were worth $1.09 billion in 2020. Fourteen countries continue to maintain their food import bans. FDA officials say they’d determining a “very low risk” to US consumers from radioactive contaminants in the foods. — JL

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Germany’s High-Level Waste Dump Plan Scrapped

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
By Christine Manwiller

On September 17, 2021 Gorleben, the highly controversial nuclear waste dump site in Lower Saxony will close. The former salt mine was chosen by government officials in 1977 to be the final repository for high-level waste. This proposal was permanently discarded by the waste management organization Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung (BGE) with their 2021 report. In it, a total of 90 sites were identified as being geologically acceptable. The Gorleben salt dome was not included in this list.

Geological issues have always caused criticism of the proposed facility. Critics called the site unsuitable, according to Deutsch Welle, “arguing that the salt in the ground could weaken containment structures and cause radioactive leaks.” In addition, a lack of consultation with local residents or municipalities, and the steamroller approach taken by the government inflamed the controversy. Gorle

Police officers blocked anti-nuclear activists from interfering with a shipment of high-level radioactive waste Nov. 11, 2001, as it approached Gorleben, Germany, which was until now the proposed site for deep underground abandonment of the waste. This photo by John LaForge, taken with standard 35-milimeter film, was fogged by exposure to gamma radiation emitted by the passing “Castor” casks. Decades of broad-based opposition ended in September when Germany announced the proposal’s cancellation.

ben became the battleground for tens of thousands of farmers, anti-nuclear activists, scientists, medical workers, and students who organized dozens of protests. In 1979, over 100,000 attended a Berlin protest, making it one of the largest in the history of West Germany. The idea of building a waste reactor fuel reprocessing plant at the Gorleben site was abandoned in 1979 largely because of the intense public outcry. However, plans for the permanent waste repository continued, and shipments of “Castor” waste casks continued to arrive and to be stored above-ground awaiting placement underground.

On May 3, 1980 some 5,000 protesters converged on a test drilling site and built a large resistance camp they named the Free Republic of Wendland. After a month, police moved in and destroyed the encampment, but the movement was energized, and shipments of waste from 1995-2011 were regularly interrupted by demonstrations involving thousands of protesters. The site received a total of 13 shipments. According to one report, the first transport held five Castor casks of “reprocessing” waste fuel elements, and the remaining 12 shipments totaled 108 Castor casks, each holding 28 canisters. The
“vitrified” or glassified waste was shipped back to Gorleben after first being transferred to France for reprocessing. The last shipment of waste in 2011 incited strong public outrage, with protestors again physically blocking vehicles. Twenty-thousand police were required to hold back the protestors.

Cancellation of the Gorleben dump is a significant win for the local community and for organized anti-nuclear activism. Germany’s state secretary for the environment, Jochen Flasbarth said in September 2021, “I hope that the wounds in [the region of] Wendland can heal now that the decades-long dispute over Gorleben is over…. Gorleben stood [as] a major social conflict in Germany for over three decades.”

However, the fight is far from over as the search continues for a permanent reactor waste abandonment facility. Germany is faced with 1,900 Castor casks of the 1-million-year radioactive hazard, which hold about 27,000 cubic meters of waste. According to BGE chairman Stefan Studt, this inventory accounts for “only five percent of Germany’s radioactive waste

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“Temporary” Storage Sites for High-Level Radioactive Waste from US Reactors Face Challenges

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
By Leona Morgan

The New Year will begin with one proposed “temporary” storage facility for high-level radioactive waste being fully-licensed, and another not far behind. The two “Consolidated Interim Storage” (CIS) sites are about 40 miles apart in the Desert Southwest: 1) the 40,000 metric ton Interim Storage Partners or ISP facility (also known as Waste Control Specialists or WCS) in Texas; and 2) Holtec Inc.’s 173,600 metric ton site — the world’s largest — in New Mexico.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved ISP’s license application in September 2021. Don Hancock, Director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, expects that NRC will issue a license to Holtec in 2022. Hancock is convinced “that the NRC will issue these two licenses,” but, he explains, there are additional obstacles to be overcome, such as economic, political, and legal challenges. Therefore “the license approval is not the final decision.”
Both CIS license applications have been challenged in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals by regional groups, national environmental organizations, and one oil and gas company. In addition, the State of Texas is challenging ISP and opposes Holtec, while the State of New Mexico is fighting both Holtec and ISP.
Terry Lodge, an attorney representing community intervenors in both cases, estimates that oral arguments for ISP may be scheduled for late Summer 2022, with a final decision in early 2023. The case against Holtec has no hearings scheduled, but may move ahead if NRC issues the license.
CIS is a national issue, since opening a site would launch thousands of cross-country shipments of the deadly waste, so 2022 must be a year of anti-CIS action.
— Leona Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico.

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