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December 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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

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

December 19, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“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.

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

October 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Regulators Approve Private Radioactive Waste Dump Critics, Texas State Law, and Court Challenge May Derail Plan

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
By Beyond Nuclear

On September 13 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted a license for a controversial centralized storage site for high-level radioactive waste in west Texas, on the New Mexico border. If it’s ever opened, the site would concentrate up to 40,000 tons of the waste uranium fuel from nuclear power reactors across the United States in one place.

The firm Interim Storage Partners (ISP), a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists and Orano (formerly the French conglomerate Areva), intends to store the irradiated reactor fuel — euphemistically known as “spent” nuclear fuel or SNF, despite the fact that it is highly radioactive and lethal — in heavy dry storage canisters on surface concrete pads. If completed, it would be the first private high-level radioactive waste site in the United States. As Ari Natter reported for Bloomberg, “The waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.” [See: How Long Does Reactor Waste Stay Deadly? p.4]

A second centralized waste dump in New Mexico, 35 miles from the ISP site, and proposed by Holtec International, is also expected to be approved by the NRC. Holtec wants a license to store another 173,600 metric tons of waste fuel in partly buried canisters. Since the total volume of this waste fuel at US reactors is about 90,000 metric tons, experts have asked why the two sites would seek a combined capacity of 213,600 metric tons. One possibility is that waste from other countries could be imported by the for-profit dump projects. The government has previously done so, storing foreign waste at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, and, in 2018, testing the transport of a “mock SNF cask” shipped from Europe to Colorado.

Lucky this time. No radioactive waste was involved on Dec. 18, 2017 when an Amtrak passenger train jumped the tracks near Tacoma, Washington and slammed into Interstate 5. The recent approval of centralized nuclear waste storage in Texas could launch thousands of risky, cross-country rail, truck and barge shipments. Photo: Washington State Patrol/Twitter

Opening either of the Desert Southwest dumps would set in motion thousands of transport shipments of the high-level waste which would cross at least 44 states. The loaded canisters and transport casks are subject to radiation leakage and other failures that pose threats to thousands of communities along the transport routes.

“Transporting highly radioactive waste is inherently high-risk,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist with Beyond Nuclear. “Fully loaded irradiated nuclear fuel containers would be among the very heaviest loads on the roads, rails, and waterways. They would test the structural integrity of degraded rails and bridges, risking derailments,” he said.

Kamps continued, “Even if the nation’s infrastructure is ever renovated, the shipping containers themselves will remain vulnerable to severe accidents and terrorist attacks, which could release catastrophic amounts of lethal radioactivity, possibly in a densely populated urban area. Even so-called ‘routine’ or ‘incident-free’ shipments are like mobile X-ray machines that can’t be turned off, in terms of the hazardous emissions of gamma and neutron radiation, dosing innocent passersby as well as transport workers.”

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board recommends spending a minimum of a decade to develop better SNF cask and canister designs before attempting to transport irradiated nuclear fuel. Yet ISP expects its “Consolidated Interim Storage Facility” to open and start accepting shipments in the next few years. However, a lawsuit in federal court and near-unanimous opposition in the Texas legislature to importing spent nuclear fuel could upend ISP’s expectations.

Siting nuclear facilities is supposed to require the consent of the host communities, but Texas has made it clear on every level it does not consent. In September, prior to the NRC licensing of the ISP facility, the Texas legislature approved a bill banning storage or disposal of high-level radioactive waste in the state, and directing the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to deny state permits that the ISP project needs. The measure passed the Texas Senate unanimously, and passed the Texas House 119-3.

“This kind of bipartisan vote is very rare,” said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition. “The message should be loud and clear: Texas doesn’t want the nation’s deadliest nuclear waste and does not consent to being a dumping ground.”

Texas Governor Abbott signed the bill into law a week before the NRC’s license approval. After it, Gov. Abbot said on Twitter, “Texas will not become America’s nuclear waste dumping ground.” Before the Texas Legislature passed the law, opposition to the ISP project in Texas was widespread and vocal.

Abbott and a group of Texas Congressional Representatives wrote to the NRC opposing the project. Resolutions against importing the waste to Texas were passed by Andrews County and five others, as well as three cities, representing a total of 5.4 million Texans. School districts, the Midland Chamber of Commerce, and oil and gas companies joined environmental and faith-based groups in opposing the ISP project.

“I am thankful that the Texas Legislature voted to stop this dangerous nuclear waste from coming to their state,” said Rose Gardner of the watchdog group Alliance for Environmental Strategies. Gardner is a party in a federal court challenge to the dumps. Two lawsuits that could block both the ISP project in Texas and the Holtec project in New Mexico — on the grounds that they violate federal law — are currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Temporary dumps prohibited by federal law

Both dump proposals are based on the presumption that the Energy Department will “take title” to the deadly material as it leaves the privately owned reactor sites, and free its current owners of liability for it. However, the transfer of ownership from private hands to the federal government is specifically prohibited by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982, as Amended, unless and until a permanent, deep dump site is open and operating — a prospect that remains decades away. The liability provision in the NWPA legally prevents “interim” storage sites from becoming permanent by default.

The Texas and New Mexico sites’ licensing processes have been approved in violation of the NWPA on the presumption that the law will be amended again.

“The NRC should never have even considered these applications, because they blatantly violate the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act by assuming that the federal government will take responsibility [ownership] of the waste before a permanent repository is licensed and operating,” said Diane Curran, an attorney for Beyond Nuclear, one of the groups that brought the suits. “Licensing the ISP and Holtec facilities would defeat Congress’s purpose of ensuring that high-level waste generated by US reactors will go to a deep geologic repository, rather than to vulnerable surface facilities that may become permanent nuclear waste dumps.”

Now that the NRC has approved the ISP facility, the briefing phase of the federal Court of Appeals lawsuit is expected to begin. Participants in the legal challenge to the ISP and Holtec facilities are a national coalition of watchdog groups that includes Beyond Nuclear, the Sierra Club, the Austin-based SEED Coalition, and Don’t Waste Michigan.

Both lawsuits were also joined by Fasken Land & Minerals, Ltd., an oil and gas company, and the Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners Association which promotes ranching and mineral rights.

“The grand illusion of nuclear power is now revealed,” said Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan.

“There is nowhere to put the waste. No community consents to accept nuclear waste — not Texas, not Michigan, or anywhere on the planet. We have to stop making it,” Keegan said.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

October 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

How Long Does Reactor Waste Stay Deadly?

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021
 “Millions of Years”

From 1982 to 2004, government regulators used 10,000 years as the time-frame required to isolate used nuclear reactor fuel rods from the environment and the water. Since no container system can be shown to be up to this task, waste dump engineers simply plan for limited containment, after which the corrosion of storage casks and the dispersal of their deadly contents are considered inevitable. 

Then a federal appeals court decided 10,000 years is a gross underestimate of the waste’s lethal persistence, and, in July 2004, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Nuclear Energy Institute, Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency that the National Academy of Sciences found “no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years.” The appeals court ruled that “repository performance” must be judged on “a time scale that is on the order of 106 [one million] years.”

One million years (50,000 generations) is an unfathomable concept and the plural “millions of years” is even more mind boggling. News accounts have repeatedly noted that high-level radioactive waste “remains radioactive for millions of years.” (New York Times, “Work is Faltering on US Repository for Atomic Waste,” Jan. 17, and “A Hitch in Plans for Nuclear Posterity,” Feb. 12, 1989). — JL

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

October 19, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Waste Water Update

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2021

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in August that it intends to use an underground piping system to pump radioactive waste cooling water into the Pacific Ocean. The government’s April decision allowing Tepco to disperse the pollution into the public commons over the next several decades caused an international uproar, with some countries promising to fight the decision in the United Nations, the World Court or perhaps the World Trade Organization. Nuclear watchdogs warned that Tepco’s use of underground pipes to disperse the contaminated waste water allows the dumping to be unregulated and difficult to monitor. — The Guardian, Aug. 26; & Agence France-Presse, Aug. 26, 2021

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

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