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Holtec Buying Rad Waste as NRC Okays Firm’s New Mexico Storage Site

By Adrian Monty
A map of current storage sites for high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. (Department of Energy)

 

The radioactive waste-handling conglomerate Holtec International is covering all the bases in its pursuit of a permanent revenue source. It’s not just close to winning a license to build a ground-level dump in southeast New Mexico for highly radioactive waste fuel known as a “consolidated interim storage facility.” The shrewd operators have also purchased a few closed nuclear reactors, guaranteeing Holtec’s own radioactive waste stream — potentially moving nation-wide along highways, railroads, and waterways, as if the storage site had already been approved. Holtec now owns Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Indian Point in New York, and both the Palisades and Big Rock Point nuclear stations in Michigan. The NRC has recommended the issuance of a license, after considering Holtec’s Environmental Impact Statement for the project. Of course, the EIS reportedly examined various land use, geologic, public health, socioeconomic, and environmental justice impacts of the plan, and declared all of them “small.” Although the current application is limited, if license amendments are approved later the site could store up to 173,600 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste from the country’s power reactors. The proposed 40-year project life implies that a “permanent” dump site will be found. However, critics say the site will likely become de facto permanent, because there are no plans for a replacement location. Final license approval is expected in early 2023, although the company still faces legal challenges and needs additional permits for construction and transportation of waste across the country.

— Carlsbad Current-Argus & NRC, July 13, 2022; https://holtecinternational.com/products-and-services/hi-store-cis/

 

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Coverup, not Cleanup, at Santa Susana, California Meltdown Site

By Bob Mayberry

 

Eighteen miles northwest of Hollywood and thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles, high in the Simi Hills, sits a government research site where rocket fuels and nuclear reactors were developed and tested. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), established in 1949 and home originally to Rocketdyne, has been the site of numerous radiation leaks, toxic chemical spills, and one partial reactor core meltdown. The soil on the entire site is toxic, but the responsible parties are doing nothing about it.

In January of this year, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) entered into “non-binding, confidential” negotiations with Boeing, the site’s current owner, which require Boeing to clean up no more than 1% of the contaminants. Under this proposed agreement, or Memo of Understanding (MOU), a panel will be chosen, by Boeing, to set the terms of the cleanup, without public input.

Removing the final hurdle for Boeing, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board approved the MOU at their Aug. 11 meeting in Santa Clarita. The Board ignored over 200 activists and residents who opposed it. Daniel Hirsch, retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called the MOU “a tragedy,” adding, “it made effective the larger deal with Boeing to let them have vastly higher levels of contamination in place.” The polluter will be in charge of the cleanup.

Fairewinds Associates’ analysis of soil and dust around the California Woolsey Fire found that the fire “caused radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab to become airborne and travel as far as nine miles into surrounding communities.” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity published Fairewinds’ paper “Radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA.” Graphic by Fairewinds.
Sordid history: meltdowns, spills, and negligence

In 1957, 1971, and 2005, fires at the SSFL caused massive radiation releases and intense radioactive saturation of the soil. In 1959, a catastrophic meltdown of the experimental Sodium Reactor released an estimated 15 to 459 times more radiation than the infamous Three Mile Island meltdown, causing radiation monitoring equipment to go “off-scale,” meaning the radioactivity in the air was too great to measure. The partial meltdown was particularly dangerous because “experimental” reactors lack the typical cement and steel containment structures associated with nuclear reactors like TMI.

For 20 years, the Department of Energy (DOE) successfully covered up the partial meltdown. However, in 1979, UCLA student Michael Rose and Hirsch, his faculty advisor, discovered internal company documentation of the meltdown. Later that year, Rocketdyne officials confirmed the accident.

In 1996, Boeing Corp. purchased Rocketdyne, thereby inheriting responsibility for cleanup of the SSFL. In 2005, Boeing paid restitution to 100 families affected by cancer, but the Santa Susana Advisory Panel estimates up to 1,600 deaths are directly due to radiation exposure from the site.

By 2006, Boeing had violated toxic discharge permits more than eighty times, releasing chromium, dioxin, lead, mercury, and other toxins into Bell Creek, which flows into the Los Angeles River. From 1988-1995 the incidence of cancer within two miles of the SSFL was 60% greater than in the general Southern California population.

In 2007, Boeing, NASA, and the DOE all signed a consent order agreeing to a cleanup. In 2010, NASA and DOE signed additional administrative orders promising to clean up respective portions of the SSFL to standards higher than were agreed to earlier — clean to background radiation levels. However, Boeing did not sign the administrative order and it remains subject to the 2007 consent order — which it has routinely ignored for 14 years.

Boeing’s practice has been cover-up, not cleanup

On November 8, 2018, the Woolsey Fire ignited near the SSFL and burned over 80% of the site in five days. According to Dr. Robert Dodge, president of the Los Angeles branch of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the chemicals on the SSFL site are “incredibly dangerous radionuclides and toxic chemicals … These toxic materials are in [the] SSFL’s soil and vegetation, and when it burns and becomes airborne in smoke and ash, there is real possibility of heightened exposure for area residents.”

Just nine hours after the Woolsey Fire began, the DTSC, charged with protecting “California’s people and environment from harmful effects of toxic substances,” announced that “the fire did not present any risks other than those normally present in a wildfire situation.”

However, three weeks after the fire was contained, independent researchers sampled soil in and around the SSFL and concluded that “site-related radioactive material … escaped the confines” of the SSFL. The most radioactive sample was collected nine miles from the SSFL. Had the 2007 Consent Order been enforced, the site would have been cleaned by the 2017 deadline, and radiation and toxic chemical exposure would not have been among the many dangers posed by the Woolsey Fire. Instead, the continuing presence of toxic substances at the SSFL site made the fire even more dangerous. Meanwhile, government agencies ignore the need for a cleanup and bow to the wishes of a corporation like Boeing.

For updates, see Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab: https://parentsagainstssfl.com/

— Bob Mayberry is a retired English and Theatre Professor at Cal State University-Channel Islands.

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Nuclear Reactors and Weapons Electrify a Warzone

Throwing gas on a burning roulette table

 

By John LaForge

Photo by ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP via Getty Images

The risk of catastrophic radiation releases is in the news again. Today it’s not because of the frequently recurring earthquakes jolting the site of three simultaneous reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi, in northeast Japan. This year’s radiation risk focus is the shooting war in Ukraine, a country with 15 operational nuclear reactors, and in particular the Zaporizhzhia complex in the city of Enerhodar. The site has six large reactors lined up like dominoes, and hundreds of tons of thermally hot and ferociously radioactive waste that must be continuously cooled in huge, engineered pools on site. As of September 15, all six reactors have been put to cold shut down for a multitude of reasons, but their hot cores and hot waste systems all still require millions of gallons of cooling water every day.

Shrouding the risks of reactor meltdowns in a cloud of grim apprehension are thinly veiled threats of attacks using nuclear weapons by Russia and NATO. Major news services repeatedly showcase supposed nuclear weapons threats hinted at by Russian authorities, while NATO’s and the United States’ official and long-standing threat of nuclear first-use — and their stationing of US nuclear bombs in five European NATO states — doesn’t warrant a mention. The risk of nuclear weapons detonations is said to be as high as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this is due as much to NATO’s threatening “Strategic Concept” declaration of June 29 as to anything President Vladimir Putin of Russia has said.

News reports repeatedly claim that the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex—which is on the Dnieper River and close to the fighting in the south—is being shelled and rocketed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. CNN reported August 18: “Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian forces of storing heavy weaponry inside the complex and using it as cover to launch attacks, knowing that Ukraine can’t return fire without risking hitting one of the six reactors. Moscow, meanwhile, has claimed Ukrainian troops are targeting the site. Both sides have tried to point the finger at the other for threatening nuclear terrorism.”

However, this “both” sounds like an absurdity, since Russian troops surrounded the vast complex soon after invading, and seized it in March. These occupying Russian forces have kept the reactor site running using its Ukrainian engineers. For Russia to attack the site would be to fire on its own personnel, endanger the operating technicians, and risk catastrophe. As such, news reports that Russia is firing on the complex appear to be disinformation or propaganda.

The Mayor of Enerhodar on August 31 again accused Russia of doing the shelling, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said during his visit there the next day, “We don’t have the elements to assess that.” What’s more likely is that the Russians are using the huge reactor site as a safe area, amassing equipment and munitions on the sprawling compound, as CNN noted.

“It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant”

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, asserted August 14, “It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant, and the dam, and hydroelectric facility on the Dnieper [River], which are necessary for its operation and safety even in a shutdown condition.” With Ukraine forces shelling the area on a regular basis, there is an ongoing chance that munitions aimed at Russian forces surrounding the site could strike one of the reactors, one of its high-level waste storage units, or power lines that supply the site with electricity to circulate cooling water.

Robert Mardini, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Guardian, “The slightest miscalculation could trigger devastation we will regret for decades,” adding that the stakes were “immense … When hazardous sites become battlegrounds, the consequences for millions of people and the environment can be catastrophic and last many years.”

In this context, Reuters news agency reported Sept. 1, “Russia’s defense ministry said up to 60 Ukrainian troops had crossed the Dnieper in boats at 6:00 a.m. local time, in what it said was a ‘provocation’ aimed at disrupting the IAEA visit’ referring to an International Atomic Energy Agency delegation. It said ‘measures had been taken’ to destroy the opposing troops.” Reuters could not verify those reports.

Additional risks were highlighted the week of August 25, when wildfires knocked out electric power to the complex. Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear reactor agency, said fires at a nearby thermal power plant caused the reactor complex’s last remaining electric power line to disconnect twice. The site’s three other lines were “lost earlier during the conflict,” the agency said, according to CNN, and the cut-off caused emergency diesel electric generators to start up in order to keep cooling water circulating, preventing potentially disastrous overheating and even reactor and/or fuel pool meltdown(s).

Electricity was restored to the site the next day, but the shutoff terrified observers who were reminded that massive radiation releases can be caused by a power outage — like the station blackout and destroyed backup generators that caused three meltdowns in Fukushima.

Russia’s invasion is doubtless an international crime under the UN Charter, and the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The world has justifiably condemned it, as it recalls the thundering denunciation of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which declared: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Of course this applies as well to NATO’s and the United States’ supremely criminal wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Panama, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine is the first bombardment and invasion of a country with operational nuclear power reactors. For the global anti-nuclear movement — whose teachers, scientists, physicians, and parliamentarians have warned that reactors are sitting-duck dirty bombs, perpetually threatening major radiation releases — its worst-case scenario of deadly risks have been realized, foisted upon the world in an enormously dangerous powder keg we can call “nuclear Russian roulette.” The US role so far has been to play “weapons testing trade show host,” offering over $40 billion in weapons, artillery, ammunition, military training, logistics, and satellite-aided intelligence to enrich our arms merchants and throw gas on the burning roulette table.

The tragic irony of war zone nuclear targets in Ukraine is the country’s zealous embrace of nuclear power on one hand, and its horrifying, ongoing experience of Chernobyl on the other. Chernobyl’s 1986 unit 4 reactor explosions, 40-day graphite fire, and hemisphere-wide radioactive fallout have killed between half-a-million and 900,000 people. In a world not turned upside-down, Ukrainians would be the last people on Earth to risk damaging nuclear reactors.

– CNN, Aug. 18; Reuters, Sept. 1; Reuters, Sept. 1; The Guardian, Sept. 3

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Sen. Markey: ‘It’s possible they don’t know what they’re doing’

Company Plans to Dump Radioactive Water from Pilgrim Reactor Into Cape Cod Bay

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Linda Pentz Gunter

At the conclusion of a close to four-hour public “field hearing” held in the community of Plymouth, Massachusetts on May 6, 2022, Senator Ed Markey, D-MA, pulled no punches.

The Senate hearing invited a number of witnesses to testify on “Issues Facing Communities with Decommissioning Nuclear Plants,” with this session specifically focused on the nearby Pilgrim nuclear reactor, which closed in 2019.

As part of the decommissioning process, Holtec International, the company that purchased the Pilgrim nuclear reactor from previous owner, Entergy, is preparing to dump a million gallons of radioactive water from the site into Cape Cod Bay as part of its decommissioning activities.

As the hearing drew to a close, Markey questioned Holtec’s competency and the leniency of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal regulator ostensibly tasked with protecting public health and safety.

“It’s possible these problems may be more a reflection of its inexperience, and not arrogance,” Markey said of Holtec. “That they don’t know what they are doing.”

A proposed NRC rule-making is in the works that would “update” (read “weaken”) federal decommissioning regulations for the nuclear industry.

“The commission’s proposed decommissioning rule shows it to be a captive agency,” said Markey, one that “shows no interest in engaging the public, which would provide even a semblance of accountability.”

Referring to the NRC’s failure to stop Holtec from looting its own taxpayer-funded decommissioning funds for company profit, Markey added that “without a stronger regulator, I fear that the only thing that will be emptier than the decommissioning trust fund will be the public’s trust in our government.”

Markey serves on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is chair of its Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.

John Lubinski, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, and Holtec International founder, president and CEO Kris Singh, were the key witnesses in Markey’s crosshairs at the hearing.

U.S. Representative Bill Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat whose district includes Plymouth where the Pilgrim reactor is located, joined Senator Markey in questioning the witness panel.

With the license now transferred from Entergy to Holtec, the New Jersey-based company has begun to decommission Pilgrim, dismantling and disposing of the reactor hulk and “cleaning up” the radioactive site.

The decommissioning work includes draining the “spent fuel” pool that sits atop the reactor building and that is presently filled with a million gallons of radioactive water. The water was used to cool and shield hundreds of tons of extremely hot high-level [radioactive] waste (the used irradiated fuel) for the past fifty years.

Any decision-making about the fate of a decommissioned reactor such as Pilgrim, said Markey, should include the meaningful participation of all impacted communities. Instead, he saw decision-making being left solely in the hands of Holtec, the apparent preference of the NRC and its current regulations, together with the agency’s decidedly “hands-off” oversight.

Pilgrim Reactor
Alternatives to ocean dumping

Both Lubinski and Singh agreed during the hearing that there were alternative ways of dealing with the radioactive water that did not involve directly dumping it into Cape Cod Bay. These would include evaporating the contaminated water into the atmosphere or shipping it off-site by truck or rail to another community.

But these “solutions” are of course far from such, and involve transport risks and environmental justice issues as well.

Currently, one of the two sites being considered to take all of the country’s high-level nuclear waste indefinitely — at what are misleadingly termed Consolidated Interim Storage Sites [emphasis added] — is in New Mexico and owned by, yes, Holtec.

That is indeed where Holtec would like to send the high-level radioactive waste transferred from Pilgrim into its on-site casks. But the liquid waste water left in the fuel pool is what the company wants to dump into the Bay.

That’s because it’s clearly the fastest, cheapest, and easiest method. Indeed, Singh bragged about the rapidity of Holtec’s decommissioning activities at Pilgrim, as if speed f

Pilgrim Reactor Evacuation Map

ills one with confidence. Quite the reverse.

The risks around this greed for speed were already flagged by Union of Concerned Scientists physicist Ed Lyman, who told NBC Boston in January, “The danger, of course, is that in their attempt to reduce the costs and timeline for decommissioning, that they will cut corners in a way that might jeopardize public health and safety.”

When questions arose during the May 6 hearing about the safety of Holtec’s onsite radioactive waste storage casks, Singh said they were not only impermeable to missile attack or a crashing airplane but that one could later “have a barbecue” on top of a cask — a strange choice given the images of fire and nuclear waste do not make happy company.

Naturally, the Cape Cod fishermen and lobster- men’s associations, along with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and area resident organizations, are vehemently opposed to the radioactive water dumping given the impact it could have on their livelihoods.

Bivalves — especially, oysters, clams and mussels — serve as filters for radioactive isotopes and bioaccumulate radiation.

Two bills that would endeavor to block Holtec’s plan to dump the radioactive water are making their way through the Massachusetts House and Senate.

However, according to reporting by Cape and Islands, it is not clear that a state ban would be sufficient and the radioactive water dump might still go ahead. “The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said repeatedly that Holtec is allowed to do so, within federal limits, and needs no further permits,” the publication reported.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the editor and curator of BeyondNuclearInternational.org and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear.

–CounterPunch, May 11, 2022

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U.S./German Radioactive Waste Importation on Hold

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Bob Mayberry

The U.S. and Germany have agreed to export highly radioactive waste fuel from the Jülich Research Center in Germany to the U.S. Energy Department’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in Aiken, South Carolina. Critics note that the transfer would appear to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has been put on hold.

According to the watchdog group SRS Watch, the Jülicher Nuclear Waste Management Company (JEN), located near the German-Dutch border, has large quantities of radioactive graphite pebbles that fueled Germany’s now defunct gas-cooled reactors. SRS originally agreed to import and process, and ultimately dump the German waste fuel at the SRS — and perhaps elsewhere in the U.S. However, objections raised by SRS Watch, and by German colleagues opposed to the export, resulted in new agreements between the SRS and JEN to commercialize the processing of irradiated graphite fuel, which includes both low- and highly enriched uranium.

H-Canyon reprocessing plant at SRS, July 30, 2015, ©High Flyer

These agreements also stand in violation of the nuclear weapons non-proliferation policies under the 1970 NPT, which requires the production of risk assessments before any processing of waste fuel. Tom Clements, a director of SRS Watch who first brought the secret deal to light, reports that any shipping of Germany’s waste reactor fuel would also be illegal under German law.

The DOE has refused to prepare such assessments, claiming that the graphite fuel poses no weapons proliferation risk.

According to Reuters, Germany agreed in 2014 to pay $10 million to the U.S. to outsource the waste fuel to SRS. But former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley threatened to fine the DOE up to $100 million a year for the delay in cleaning up the site’s colossal Cold War radioactive waste problems.

Consequently, the U.S.-German agreement has been delayed, and the parties have shifted their focus to commercializing the processing of the waste. However, techniques for removing highly enriched uranium from this aged and highly radioactive “pebble bed” experimental fuel have still not been developed.

–  SRS Watch, April 11, 2022;  Newswires, 21 February 2020; Reuters, 28 July 2014

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