Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

 By John LaForge 

The proposed Deep Geological Repository for radioactive waste being considered by Canada’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) is such a bad idea that even pro-nuclear Republican US senators like Illinois’ Mark Kirk are against it. Still, it’s not dead yet.

The Southgate Michigan News-Herald reported last September that “some of the waste is highly radioactive and much of it will remain toxic for more than 100,000 years. The proposed site is less than a mile inland from the shore of Lake Huron and about 440 yards below the lake level. It is approximately 120 miles upstream from the main drinking water intakes for southeastern Michigan.”

The language is from a Michigan State Senate resolution against the dump which passed last year. Now the US Senate has taken up the fight with a similar bill introduced by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and co-sponsored by Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin. Dozens of cities along the Great Lakes, Duluth, Minnesota included, have formally opposed the craziness of burying leaky tins of radiation in a watershed that serves H₂O to 40 million people.

Dave Herndon, writing for the News-Herald dug up this zinger: The Canadian government itself raised identical objections about radioactive waste near drinking water in the 1980s, when the US Energy Department surveyed sites for a US waste dump. Back then, Canada formally protested and a Parliamentary resolution urges US officials to prevent such a dump from ever being built in the Great Lakes Basin.

Ontario’s Joint Review Panel (JRP) will make a recommendation to the federal government after studying the plans pros and cons. It has held two sets of formal hearings, and loads of highly critical testimony is in the record. Not the least is that of former Ontario Power Generation (OPG) scientist Frank Greening.

OPG—the radioactive waste producer that runs 18 reactors in Ontario—is the dump’s chief promoter. Dr. Greening worked for the company for 22 years.

Radioactive waste generator’s “cavalier attitude” 

A PhD in chemistry, Dr. Greening testified last September that OPG has a “cavalier attitude” toward the long-lived hazards of radioactive wastes.

(In 2013, I testified likewise that one particularly cavalier information sheet from OPG said, “…even if the entire waste volume were to be dissolved into Lake Huron, the corresponding drinking water dose would be a factor of 100 below the regulatory criteria initially, and decreasing with time.” This quip refers to 200,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste in over 50,000 containers.)

In his attack on OPG’s analysis, Dr. Greening reported that the company estimated the sorts of radioactive materials that would be in the waste—and in what proportions—instead of taking samples. “Estimating is cheaper,” Greening told the panel on Sept. 10. “OPG has chosen to skimp on the costs of properly characterizing [its] radioactive waste, perhaps because the analysis of just one sample costs over a thousand dollars,” Greening said.

Last April, Greening reported that materials to be placed in the dump are up to 1,000 times more radioactive than OPG had formally reported. Dr. Greening’s report devastated the company’s (OPG’s) public image and professional credibility.

After Greening broadcast OPG’s gross mistakes, the company said its errors resulted from the use of “available data” in 2010.

“This is simply not true,” Greening then charged. “OPG did not use available data, but used fabricated data instead.”

With cesium-137, OPG’s numbers “are 1,000 times lower” than the actual radioactivity level in some of the waste, Greening discovered. “[OPG] got these numbers wrong up front …” Greening said. “Why would I trust [OPG’s] numbers now?”

Replying to Greening’s crucial testimony, Dr. Stella Swanson, the chair of the JRP, warned that some of his information was “new to the panel,” and could for that reason perhaps be ignored. New information was supposed to been given to the JRP in advance of September’s formal hearings.

Dr. Swanson said the government panel will rule later on whether all of Greening’s materials would be accepted for review.

Louder and more robust objections to OPG’s Lake Huron dump plan need to be organized in order to make the Canadian authorities do the right thing. Senator Stabenow made a start when she told the press, “Canada’s proposed nuclear waste dump … puts our Great Lakes at risk of radioactive contamination that could have devastating consequences for future generations. I have expressed my strong objections to the Canadian government directly, and (this) resolution puts additional pressure on the Canadians to stop this plan.”

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

By Victor Gilinsky 

The Republican takeover of the Senate and consequent sidelining of the Democratic majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, will undoubtedly increase calls for reviving the Department of Energy’s (DOE) proposed nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The project got a big boost from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff when it recently concluded that the DOE has “demonstrated compliance with NRC regulatory requirements” limiting long-term radioactive leakage from the proposed repository. This result produced headlines like this, which ran in the New York Times: “Calls to use Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste site, now deemed safe.”

US Rep. John Shimkus, R-Illinois, said, “Today’s report confirms what we’ve expected all along: Nuclear waste stored under that mountain, in that desert, surrounded by federal land, will be safe and secure for at least a million years.”

But the hosannas are premature. The NRC staff did not explain, and no one in the media seems to have caught on, that its favorable conclusion reflected the DOE’s pie-in-the-sky design for Yucca Mountain—not the repository as it is likely to be configured. The likely repository configuration doesn’t come close to meeting NRC requirements.

The key design element in question is something the DOE calls a “drip shield.” This is a kind of massive, corrosion-resistant titanium alloy mailbox that is supposed to sit over each of the thousands of waste canisters in Yucca Mountain’s underground tunnels. In NRC’s definition, it is designed “to prevent seepage water from directly dripping onto the waste package outer surface.”

The name drip shield itself is a giveaway that there is a water problem at Yucca Mountain. There is indeed a lot more water—and it is flowing faster—than the DOE imagined when it picked the site, which is why it added the drip shield to the original design. Without the titanium shields, dripping water would corrode the waste canisters placed in the repository and release radioactive waste, and the moving underground water would carry it to the nearby environment. Using the corrosion data in the DOE’s license application, one can calculate that this corrosion would take not the “million years” cited by Rep. Shimkus, but about 1,000 years.

Although the DOE has included the drip shields as part of the repository design, and NRC has accepted them for license-review purposes, the DOE doesn’t actually plan to install the shields until at least 100 years after the waste goes in. Presumably, this delay is based on financial considerations; installing the shields early in the project would add hugely to the repository’s [estimated $90 billion*] cost and thus threaten its funding prospects in Congress. If you look more closely into the situation, you can’t escape the conclusion that it is highly implausible that the drip shields will ever be installed. In fact, as a practical matter, it may not even be physically possible to install them.

According to DOE’s plan, after the radioactive waste canisters are placed in the repository tunnels, the site would receive minimal attention for many decades. After a hundred years or so, before the repository was permanently closed, the DOE would install the protective drip shields. So it says. Because of the radioactive underground environment, it would take highly specialized robotic equipment to install the shields with the required precision. None of this equipment has been designed, or even thought through.

Realistically, a century into the project, the underground tunnels would have deteriorated considerably and collapsed in part. Dust would sharply limit visibility. The tunnels would have to be cleared of rubble for a remotely operated underground rail system to transport robotic equipment and the five-ton drip shields to the waste canisters. The shields would then have to be installed end-to-end, so as to form a continuous metal cover inside the tunnels, obviously a delicate, complex, and extremely expensive operation. Is it reasonable to believe that after 100 years, with the nuclear waste in the repository long out of the public mind, that Congress would appropriate enormous sums of money for the DOE to go back into the tunnels to install the shields? Can we really rely on an agency that hasn’t yet cleaned up a nationwide radioactive mess that dates from World War II to keep a promise that it will do something a century into the future? Will there even be a DOE in 100 years?

Naturally, because it would be fatal to the project, the DOE does not display a computer simulation that shows what happens at Yucca Mountain without drip shields. More surprising, the NRC has not asked for such a simulation. However, the result for the no-drip-shield situation can be extrapolated from simulations that the DOE has run for other contingencies.

The former head scientist for the Yucca Mountain project confirmed to me in 2008 that the extrapolation result obtained in this way is correct. (Disclosure: I was then working for the State of Nevada, which of course opposes the project.) The DOE argued, however, that such a calculation was irrelevant, because the NRC cannot, in its review of the Yucca Mountain project, look past the promise of its “sister agency” that it would install the crucial drip shields. That argument seems to have worked in keeping simulations of the behavior of a no-drip-shield Yucca Mountain out of NRC proceedings, and out of the public eye.

A truly independent regulatory agency—one truly representing the public interest—would not have been silent on the low likelihood that drip shields will ever be installed and would have insisted on getting the DOE’s calculations on what happens if the drip shields don’t get installed. It comes down to this: The NRC is going along with a shell game to advance the political fortunes of the Yucca Mountain project.

—A physicist, Victor Gilinsky is an independent consultant and formerly advised the State of Nevada on matters related to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. He served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975 to 1984. He wrote this commentary for the Nov. 5, 2014 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 

*AP, “Price Tag for Nuclear Waste Dump,” New York Times, July 16, 2008

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2014

An October 14 accident at the Erwin ResinSolutions nuclear waste processing facility in Erwin, Tennessee, led to the death of one employee and exposed other employees and emergency responders to reportedly small amounts of radiation. ResinSolutions employee Gary Reedy, 51, fell 25 feet down a concrete hole into a “transfer vault” where radioactive resins from commercial nuclear power facilities are unloaded before being moved for treatment and packaging. The cause of his fall is under internal investigation by ResinSolutions’ parent company, Utah-based EnergySolutions, as well as the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the state’s Department of Environment and Conservation.

According to Ed Herndon, Unicoi County Emergency Management Services Director, an ambulance crew and the local volunteer fire department responded to the 911 call, and these first responders as well as other ResinSolutions employees removed Reedy from the vault. He was then taken to Johnson City Medical Center, where he died of his injuries. Reedy, the first responders, and other employees who pulled him from the vault all got what Herndon called “a small amount” of radioactive material on them.

EnergySolutions is an international radioactive waste processing company and is the Energy Department contractor in charge of packing Los Alamos National Laboratory waste for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), including the mislabeled barrel that burst and caused the leak that closed the facility in February. (See WIPP article on Page 1.)

—Erwin Record, Oct. 14, Nov. 6; Knoxville News-Sentinal, Oct. 15, 2014