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Public Weighing in on Environmental Impact of Holtec and ISP CIS

By Leona Morgan
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

Holtec International in partnership with Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance (ELEA) is currently seeking to license, build and operate a “temporary” dump for high-level radioactive waste—used reactor fuel rods. Their proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) anticipates waste storage for 40 years initially, with 80 years of renewals, totaling 120 years of operation. Since the application for the Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS) facility in southeast New Mexico was submitted in March 2017, opponents have been raising their voices against it.

Completing the licensing application and becoming permitted to operate a CIS is a long procedure. Nonetheless, Holtec has met legal resistance at every step. Recently, the application has been before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB), which functions under the NRC. Aside from the ASLB process, Holtec’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) evaluation is also moving forward.

Six separate petitioners submitted over 50 arguments to the ASLB opposing the project. These entities formally challenged the legitimacy of Holtec’s application and raised “contentions” about nation-wide waste transports, risks to water, integrity of canisters, legality of the license, exposure to radiation, and environmental justice, to name a few. The NRC/ASLB judges denied all the original contentions. Appeals to intervene by the petitioners were also denied (See “NRC Okays Unlawful Licensing Language in Planned NM Radioactive Waste Site”). Another round of appeals will be filed and a few contentions may be considered. One in particular relates to safety concerns over the proximity of oil and gas production to the dump site. The issue was raised by New Mexico State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard, who also informed the NRC that Holtec neglected to communicate with the State Land Office and misrepresented its ownership of the site.

As part of the NEPA assessment, Holtec’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement was recently published, and the NRC is currently accepting public comments. However, there are no clear plans for public hearings. Community members are concerned that the NRC may hold webcast meetings in lieu of in-person hearings, silencing the voices of the area residents who are most impacted. People of color, mostly Hispanic, would be disproportionately affected if the proposal moves ahead—a clear example of environmental racism.

Terry Lodge, attorney for a national coalition of organizations that was denied intervention by the ASLB, says, “The Draft Environmental Impact Statement answers nearly none of the questions raised by the seven grassroots groups who intervened from across the country. The evidence shows that Holtec may hold [waste reactor] fuel indefinitely, counted as multiple centuries, not 100 years. If there is no final underground repository licensed, Holtec—sitting there with shallow-buried ‘forever’ waste—is it. New Mexico must not lose this fight.”

Two applications for CIS are currently going through the NEPA process. Interim Storage Partners’ application is facing a time line and pattern of opposition similar to Holtec.

Take Action: New Mexico’s and national groups opposing both proposals urge everyone to send public comments by their respective deadlines: September 22, 2020 for Holtec/ELEA, and Sept. 4, 2020 for Interim Storage Partners (Waste Control Specialists/Orano USA). Holtec: E-mail comments to: Holtec-CISFEIS@nrc.gov. Please include the Docket Number—docket ID NRC-2018-0052—in your email subject line, as well as in the text of your emailed comments.  See sample comments here. Waste Control Specialists (Interim Storage Partners): WCS_CISF_EIS@nrc.gov. The Docket ID, NRC-2016-0231, should be included in the subject line of comments.

— Leona Morgan works with Nuclear Issues Study Group and Halt Holtec in New Mexico.

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Melting Ice & Sea Level Rise Could Spread Abandoned Military Rad Wastes

The main trench at Camp Century in Greenland led to an underground city carved out of the ice. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By John LaForge

From opposite ends of the Earth, radioactive wastes left by the US military are colliding with climate disruption—icecap melt and sea level rise—threatening to further contaminate the oceans.

In the Greenland icecap, the US military dug 120 feet down into ice in 1959 and excavated enough to build a small “town.” Intended as an anti-Soviet nuclear missile launch site, the Pentagon carved over 1.5 miles of ice tunnels and chambers into the ice for laboratories, a dining hall, a recreation area, work space, a hospital, and living quarters for up to 200 soldiers, according to news accounts. Unfortunately, Camp Century, as it was called, was lit and heated by the world’s first “mobile” nuclear reactor.

When the site was abandoned in 1967, the military reportedly packed out the reactor vessel, but left behind 9,000 tons of biological, chemical and radioactive waste, “on the assumption it would be ‘preserved for eternity’” by the island’s historically perpetual accumulation of snow and ice, Jon Henley wrote for The Guardian.

In the years since, ice and snow cover above the dump has increased to about 110 feet, but today’s rapidly accelerating heating of the climate means the waste could eventually be uncovered, and melting ice water could potentially carry the toxins into the Atlantic. A study of this unplanned eventuality, led by William Colgan from Toronto’s York University, was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Colgan told The Guardian, “Our estimate is that by 2090, the exposure will be irreversible. It could happen sooner if the magnitude of climate change accelerates.” Indeed, global temperature rise over the last four years has greatly outpaced the most severe scientific models, and last July was the hottest recorded in human history.

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Meanwhile, Susanne Rust, reporting for Los Angeles Times, wrote recently that, “… on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.”

While Greenland’s melting ice helps propel sea level rise, 10,000 miles away on Runit Island, in the Anewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands—where the US conducted some 67 nuclear bomb detonation experiments—a giant cement-covered radioactive waste dump site is being threatened by the rapidly rising seas.
Under the cement cover known as Runit Dome, there are over 3 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive waste left by the US military’s nuclear bomb testing authorities. Like the US waste in Greenland’s warming ice, radioactive military debris is threatening to spread to the rising Pacific partly because of US industry-led carbon and methane pollution. As Susan Rust reported , “Now the concrete coffin, which locals call ‘The Tomb,’ is at risk of collapsing from rising seas and other effects of climate change. Tides are creeping up its sides, advancing higher every year as distant glaciers melt and ocean waters rise.”

“More than any other place, the Marshall Islands is a victim of the two greatest threats facing humanity—nuclear weapons and climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, a legal scholar at Columbia University’s law school, the LA Times article noted. “The United States is entirely responsible for the nuclear testing there, and its emissions have contributed more to climate change than those from any other country,” Gerrard said.

— Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 2019, The Guardian, Sept 27, 2016; Scientific American, Aug. 5, 2016

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House Committee Okays Changes to High-Level Waste Dump Law

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

The US House Energy & Commerce Committee passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019—H.R. 2699—by a voice vote Nov. 20. This dangerously bad high-level radioactive waste bill is among the most controversial in Congress. H.R. 2699 would allow for the opening of one or more waste dumps in the US Southwest—so-called Consolidated Interim Storage Facilities (CISFs)—now targeted for New Mexico and Texas (by Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance at New Mexico, and by Interim Storage Partners/Waste Control Specialists in Texas). The bill also reopens plans for permanent abandonment of the waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada—on Western Shoshone Indian land—a scientifically unsuitable site that was eliminated in 2010. If any of these dumps opens, large-scale shipments of high-risk irradiated waste reactor fuel would travel by road, rail, and/or waterway through most states, past millions of homes. The bill now moves closer to a House floor vote. What can you do? Please contact your US Rep’s via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to oppose H.R. 2699, and to oppose funding for both the Yucca dump and any CISF. Urge them to instead support good bills like the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act (S. 649/H.R. 1544), and the STRANDED Act (S. 1985). —Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear

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Secret, Mislabeled Radioactive Waste Shipment Discredits Department of Energy

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Kelly Lundeen

In early July, the US Department of Energy astonished Nevada when it divulged that for six years it had been sending mixed-level radioactive waste labeled as low-level to the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site). Nine shipments of 32 containers each were transported without proper labeling and stored at the Site without adhering to the minimal legal requirements for protective handling. The Nevada National Security Site has been designated as a permanent disposal site for low-level radioactive waste, for example rags, construction debris and other materials exposed to radioactivity as well as mixed-level radioactive waste like radioactive garbage and sludge, as long as it is in compliance with the security site’s waste acceptance criteria. The waste received was out of compliance.

This follows the recent revelation that the DOE secretly sent weapons-grade plutonium to the site last year without informing government entities or tribes. Leaders of 13 tribes and the governors of Nevada and New Mexico have publicly shown opposition to these shipments. In a letter to DOE Secretary Perry tribal chair of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, Chris Spotted Eagle wrote, “As a Southern Nevada tribe, our reservations—one in downtown Las Vegas and another in the northwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley—are in direct proximity to the transportation routes that may have been utilized for this shipment to the Nevada National Security Site.”

A coalition of nine southwest grass roots organizations including Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, Uranium Watch, the Utah Sierra Club, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and others is now putting pressure on Utah governor Gary Herbert to take a lesson from tribal and Nevada and New Mexico state leaders to express concern over radioactive shipments. Nestled between the three proposed radioactive waste sites of Yucca Mountain, Holtec in New Mexico and WCS/ISP in Texas, Utah would be along a transportation route for most of the nation’s 70,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste to reach any of these destinations if one of them is ever chosen as a storage site.

In a letter to Governor Herbert, the organizations asked that he, “(1) object to the use of Utah roads and rails to ship mischaracterized radioactive wastes that are not legal to store or dispose of at facilities in Nevada or elsewhere, and (2) oppose consolidated interim storage of [radioactive] spent nuclear fuel in Utah and in any State that objects to such a facility.” Utah residents can ask the governor to speak out at www.healutah.org/actionalert/. In essence, they would like the governor to ask the DOE to follow the law.

Following the six years of mishandling mixed-level radioactive waste, the DOE said it would temporarily halt shipments and launch an internal investigation. At the heart of the issue is the credibility of the Department of Energy. In the case of the 2018 plutonium shipment, there was an enormous quantity of highly radioactive plutonium knowingly sent across at least seven states without alerting residents or first responders along transportation routes.

On March 20 this year, US Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada announced that DOE Secretary Rick Perry had “promised to give her a firm time line as to when the weapons-grade plutonium that was secretly shipped into Nevada last year will leave the state,” according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. However in August a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals not only denied the state’s request to remove the plutonium, but also dismissed the appeal for a ban on new shipments of highly radioactive plutonium. The Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford will seek a new court order for its removal.

—Mineral County Independent-News, Aug. 22; Washington Post, Aug. 16; Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, accessed July 29; Native News Online, Mar. 27, 2019

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Radiation and Colonialism Leave a Permanent Stamp on New Mexico—Part II

(See Part I)

July 16—New Mexico’s Day of Infamy

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019
By Leona Morgan of Nuclear Issues Study Group

July 16th is a day of infamy for New Mexico, as it is the anniversary of the world’s largest uranium spill near Churchrock in 1979, and of the Trinity test, the first atomic weapon detonation in 1945.

Hibakusha & Internationals Commemorate July 16

In 2016, organizers in uranium-impacted communities called for an international day of action every July 16, to spotlight the unaddressed consequences of the Churchrock Spill and the ongoing global genocide of indigenous peoples from nuclear colonialism. The first to respond were organizers [Nukewatch and Nonviolent Action for Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, Germany] protesting the deployment of US weapons at the German military base in Büchel in 2017. In 2018, solidarity events took place in the US, Germany, Spain, England, and France. This year, the local group Red Water Pond Road Community Association held its 11th annual day of remembrance of Churchrock. More than 200 folks attended from as far away as Japan.

The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC) hosted a town hall meeting and its 10th annual candlelight vigil to remember the lives lost due to the Trinity Test. Participants called out the names of all those lost to cancer, and read statements of support from Congressional offices and allies. Tina Cordova of TBDC reported that they “called out around 800 names. The list grows every year. We also held a tribute in memory of all the children that were lost as a result of the Trinity Test or were stillborn. This is such a horrible legacy! Children died and the government still lied.”

The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium remind us that before Hiroshima, there was Trinity.

Toshiya Morita, a second generation Hibakusha (people affected by the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), traveled from Kyoto, Japan to take part in both the Churchrock and Tularosa events. Morita recalls, “When I went to New Mexico I saw a lot of Hibakusha. Most of them are Indigenous people by uranium mines… [and] other Hibakusha by nuclear tests. I feel all of Hibakusha in the United States are one of my family… I want to walk with all of you to the no nuclear world!”

Exposed Communities Demand Compensation

Also on July 16, Representative Ben Ray Lujan, D-NM, introduced the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendments of 2019 (H.R. 3783). The bill would extend much-deserved compensation to all who have been impacted by the US military’s use of uranium weapons. The bill includes an apology, an extension of the fund until 2045 (beyond the current 2022 sunset date), and expansion of compensation to uranium mill and mine workers who worked after 1971 (up to 1990) and to nuclear weapons test downwinders in additional locations—including Tularosa Basin and Guam. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate on March 28, 2019 by Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho (S. 947).

Opposition to Centralized Waste Dump Continues

Today, the same region of Trinity’s radioactive fallout is being threatened by two proposals for consolidation of high-level waste nuclear fuel from reactors. Although New Mexico does not have any commercial nuclear power reactors, and such a waste dump would not be legal, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is proceeding with the National Environmental Policy Act process for license applications from both Holtec International and Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP). ISP is a partnership between Waste Control Specialists and Orano—formerly Areva Corp. Scoping for both dumps was completed in 2018, and the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Holtec is expected in March 2020, while ISP’s is expected in May 2020. Both proposals are being legally challenged within the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB). The ASLB hearing for ISP took place in Midland, Texas, on July 10 and was well attended by community folks opposing the so-called “Consolidated Interim Storage” facility.

—Leona Morgan works with the Nuclear Issues Study Group in New Mexico.

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