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September 2, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Poly-Met’s 500-Year Copper Nickle Pollution

The answer man Donald Trump said August 8 that halting all new federal regulations will create jobs. Notwithstanding the jobs created by implementing new regulations, Trump’s proposal has already been tried by the State of Minnesota, in a retroactive way, with consequences that are predictably toxic to water.

In 2015, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) was forced to abandon its duty to protect state waters from mining runoff after the Legislature passed bills that “essentially exempted taconite mining” operations from complying with the 40-year-old sulfate standard for waters with wild rice — as Mordecai Specktor reports in the August 2016 issue of The Circle.

Paula Maccabee, advocacy director and chief counsel of the non-profit group Water Legacy, interviewed by Specktor, said the 2015 law that instructed the MPCA not to enforce the sulfate pollution standard “was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Water Legacy then petitioned the US Environmental Protection Agency over the State Legislature’s and the MPCA’s “failure to respect the [US] Clean Water act and to enforce laws limiting mine pollution.”

Maccabee tole me in an email Aug. 8 “We consider the EPA’s protocol and the EPA’s many letters and requests for information from Minnesota agencies to function as replies to WaterLegacy’s petition to remove Minnesota state agencies” from oversight of mining operations.”

EPA staff are still in the process of conducting an in-depth investigation, so they have neither reached conclusions regarding their potential findings nor communicated them either to WaterLegacy or to MPCA. … I expect that both WaterLegacy and the MPCA will be given an opportunity to comment when EPA has reached the point of preparing draft findings resulting from its investigation.

“I believe it is likely that the MN attorney general will respond to EPA’s questions by August 12, since the AG hasn’t requested an additional extension of time.

PolyMet’s early pollution projections admitted that acid mine drainage – which permanently destroys surface water systems — from its proposed sulfide mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness would be a serious problem for over 500 years. Consequently, PolyMet must be legally required to monitor for and clean up acid mine drainage for 500 years.

A 500-year cleanup mandate must also be applied to all future follow-on companies that will replace what’s now called “PolyMet.” Changing the name of mining companies is an age-old method of avoiding legal liability. PolyMet’s promises of clean copper-sulfide mining must be backed up with permanent guarantees for monitoring, and waste disposal, cleanup and reclamation no matter what subsequent PolyMet knockoff companies might be named.
Of course such a mandate has never been imposed on a mine project and would probably kill the proposal if imposed. This is why the embarrassing 500-year pollution warning has been buried by PolyMet and never appeared in the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) Nov. 6, 2015.
Instead, the company and DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr use the term “indefinitely.” How can PolyMet be forced to prevent pollution “indefinitely”?

This is because PolyMet’s promises are really hot air, and Minnesota’s reputation at a good environmental steward is actually a myth that has never applied to Minnesota mining practices.

• Why has there been no independent water modeling required in the environmental review process? Critics point out that all the data and analysis of how much polluted water could drain from the mine site and the tailings site has come from PolyMet.

• As Water Legacy notes, “Across the country, there is no example where a sulfide mine has been operated and closed without polluting surface and/or groundwater with acid mine drainage, sulfuric acid and/or toxic metals.” Why has PolyMet been allowed to submit a shabbily supported environmental review based on unsubstantiated claims and faulty data?

• The FEIS concludes that it’s “unlikely” acid mine drainage will move north into the pristine Boundary Waters Wilderness, but that if the permanent pollution does flow north (permanently), PolyMet will “fill cracks in the bedrock.” Why is the potential devastation of the Boundary Waters, an otherwise highly-protected national wilderness treasured because of its lack of pollution, allowed to be brushed off with such fatuous gibberish?

I’m sure I’m not the first person to howl at that concept of “filling cracks in the bedrock.” The idea sounds like bovine excrement, or like the unworkable “ice wall” being built in Japan to slow groundwater flowing through Fukushima’s three melted reactors.

Filed Under: Environment, Sulfide Mining, Uncategorized, Weekly Column

September 1, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Dangerous Nuclear Plant Rising on DC’s Doorstep

By JOHN LAFORGE / CounterPunch / SEPT. 1, 2016

Dominion Virginia Power, a section of the giant utility Dominion, is proceeding unlawfully with construction of its $19-billion-plus power reactor 80 miles from Washington, DC — called North Anna 3 — and must get formal approval from the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) before it can continue, according to a petition filed August 30th by the Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (VCCC; ), a nonprofit group based in Elliston, Va.

The group’s “Petition for a Declaratory Judgment” says in part: “At an estimated total cost of at least $19.2 billion, North Anna 3 would be the most expensive power [reactor] ever built in the United States and could raise customers’ rates by 26 % or more according to the Virginia Attorney General. While Dominion claims that North Anna 3 is needed for compliance with the federal Clean Power Plan, it would be far costlier than the low-carbon alternative of combined renewables, demand-side management, and efficiency … Dominion has not complied with Virginia law by failing to seek SCC approval before making expenditures on project development and beginning preliminary construction of North Anna 3.”

VCCC President Irene Leech said in a statement: “This is a huge raid on the pocketbooks of Virginia consumers and businesses. Dominion has spent approximately $600 million on project development and preliminary construction of North Anna 3, but has not yet sought or obtained Virginia State Corporation Commission approval for those expenditures. This is not a lawful or prudent way for Dominion to proceed when ratepayers are going to end up footing the bill. We’ve already seen ratepayers in this state stuck with a tab for over $300 million for the North Anna 3 project and there is no guarantee a reactor will ever be built or a single electron of power will be generated.”

In a formal declaration submitted in support of VCCC’s petition, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Commissioner Peter Bradford, who also served as chairman of state utility regulatory agencies in both New York and Maine and now is an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School, wrote: “The economic impact of North Anna 3 on Virginia will be immense. Dominion’s construction cost estimate of $19.2 billion dollars (including financing costs) for the proposed 1470 megawatt power reactor would be a commitment of about $2,400 for every citizen of Virginia, or $9,600 per family of four, and — of course — the impact is even greater because it is confined to Dominion customers.”

“Abysmally wasteful and unnecessary”

On July 12, 2016, Dr. Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis, Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, also submitted formal comments on behalf of VCCC. Dr. Cooper calls the North Anna 3 project “abysmally wasteful and unnecessary,” concluding that it would cost twice as much as solar to generate the same amount of energy, [and] fatten profits for shareholders by inflating Virginia ratepayer bills by up to 36% (reflecting $6-12 billion in unnecessary costs).

Dr. Cooper’s analysis concluded: “North Anna 3 is unreasonable, unnecessary, inefficient and wasteful and should be removed from Dominion’s Integrated Resource Plan. Dominion is incorrect in asserting that North Anna 3 is needed to satisfy the requirements of the (EPA) Clean Power Plan. To the contrary, a combination of renewables, demand side management, and efficiency can not only provide equivalent capacity, but also the same level of excess capacity.”

Dominion’s corporate website says the company “is a safe, world-class nuclear operator, and as part of its strategy to ensure adequate, reliable electricity for the future, the company is taking steps toward constructing a third nuclear generating unit adjacent to its existing two nuclear units at its North Anna Power Station in Louisa Co., Va.”

On Aug. 23, 2011, the North Anna site was rocked by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook Dominion’s old reactors 1 & 2 twice as hard as they were built to handle. This unanticipated “violation” was the first of its kind in the country’s 60-year-long history of nuclear power, and came six months after the catastrophic earthquake-tsunami-and-triple meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. The Virginia quake moved 25 of Dominion’s outdoor waste casks — that hold highly radioactive, extremely hot waste fuel and weigh 115 tons each — up to 4.5 inches.

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but the $19 billion Unit 3 is being built above an earthquake fault.

For more info: VCCC: www.consumerfed.org/virginia-citizens-consumer-council

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

Filed Under: Nuclear Power, Weekly Column

August 23, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Waste Isolation Pilot” Becomes $2 Billion Waste Dispersal Site

In 1989, the renowned undersea explorer Jacque Cousteau said, “A common denominator in every single nuclear accident — a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine — is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, ‘There’s no danger to the public.’ They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt.”

On Feb. 14, 2014 a barrel of plutonium-contaminated waste blew apart deep underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP experiment was an attempt to discard some plutonium wastes left from 60 years of nuclear weapons production. The uncontrolled explosion spewed plutonium particles throughout the vast, mine-like underground chambers and scattered them all up and down the 2,150-foot deep elevator and ventilations shafts, closing the dumpsite indefinitely. This week the Los Angeles Times reports that it will cost at least $2 billion to repair the damage and to attempt decontamination.

Ventilation shaft filtration systems failed to keep the contamination underground, and a federal investigation found two dozen violations of safety procedures, yet even 2.5 years later the government doesn’t know why the barrel blew. “And [the $2B] does not include the complete replacement of the contaminated ventilation system or any future costs of operating the mine longer than originally planned,” the Times reported.

At WIPP, Cousteau’s ‘common denominator’ kicked in as usual. As the LA Times said: “When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department [DOE] rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation…”

Dispersed plutonium-laden dusts were pulled up the deep shafts by the huge ventilation fans on the surface and at least 13 workers on site that day were exposed.

The DOE now says 13 workers present during the radioactive release “were tested for internal radioactive contamination” (emphasis added) and that “Initial fecal samples measured some radioactivity above normal background levels.” This admission is vanishingly rare and extremely serious for the victims, considering the inability to decontaminate your insides.

The DOE also says that 140 workers were exposed to radiation the following day (it doesn’t use the word “plutonium” much), and that “… 22 were notified that their exposure was below the 10 millirem level, which is about the same exposure a person would get from a chest x-ray.”

Regular readers will recall that for the government to compare internal radiation exposure to X-rays is deliberate, sophisticated disinformation, because X-rays only dose the target with radiation externally. The difference is highly significant. Dr. Chris Busby, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign (llrc.org), says it’s the difference between sitting in front of a warm fire, and popping a hot coal from the fire into your mouth. (The Energy Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Nuclear Security Administration all use this magician’s trick: getting us to look at the wrong thing.)

WIPP’s worker exposures were internal or breathed-in exposures, in which hot particles can lodge in tissue or bone and then for long periods of time bombard surrounding cells with deadly radiation.

The pro-nuke lobby will chant that ‘nobody died at WIPP’ because of the 2014 disaster. But radiation shortens lives and causes dozens of debilitating diseases and disorders short of death including nose bleeds, bleeding gums, joint pain, hair loss, liver disorders, elevated blood pressure, gastro intestinal problems, muscle pain, headaches, fatigue, skin rashes, respiratory problems, heart problems, miscarriages, stillbirths, infant mortality, birth abnormalities, and cancers.

The so-called Pilot Project at Carlsbad had been promoted as the disposal answer for plutonium-tainted nuclear weapons waste, and was “designed to last 10,000 years.” But as Santa Monica, Calif. activist Myla Reson reports, “The dump failed 9,985 years ahead of schedule.”

And we’re safer for it, Reson says, “because justification for approval of the dump relied on a fabricated site characterization and analysis” which made continued use of the dump potentially catastrophic — either through onsite explosions, long-term ground water contamination, or transportation disasters involving crashes en route from Hanford, Washington and the Idaho National Lab, and a dozen other H-bomb production sites from Livermore, Calif., to Oak Ridge Tenn.

Filed Under: Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column

August 2, 2016 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Historians, Military Commanders Agree: Atomic Bombs Were Unnecessary

Seventy years ago, in April 1946, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, led by Paul Nitze, concluded its extensive official study and concluded, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

“[C]ertainly prior to 31 December and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945” the official survey found, according to Gar Alperovitz in his definitive work on the subject, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth” (Knopf 1995).

Likewise, the official report of the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division — also completed in April 1946, yet only discovered in 1989 — concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war. According to Alperovitz in The Decision, the Group “judged that it was ‘almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.’”

The Russians declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, and, — expanding on President Truman’s July 17 journal entry, “Fini Japs when that comes about” — Major General Curtis LeMay, Chief of the 21st Bomber Command, declared for the record at a press conference Sept. 20, 1945: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” Pressed by a reported who asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” LeMay answered, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” General LeMay calculated that the Japanese would surrender by September 1, after his mass firebombing effort would have destroyed “everything” in Japan.

Former governor Sarah Palin criticized Barak Obama his May 27 visit to Hiroshima. Gov. Palin said Obama had insulted veterans of WW II. On the contrary, the story that the atomic bombings were justifiable retribution for Japanese aggression and to prevent US military casualties is the worst insult and trivialization of Pacific theater veterans. The death-defying bomber units and combat troops that sacrificed so mightily in bloody drawn-out battles for Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere are the people who actually won the war as dozens of high-level military officers have testified.

Admiral Lewis Strauss wrote to the naval historian Robert G. Albion Dec. 19, 1960: for “authoritative statements as to the condition of Japan in the late spring, at least from the Navy’s point of view, there are statements by Admiral [Ernest J.] King, Admiral [William F.] Halsey, Admiral [Arthur] Radford, Admiral [Chester W.] Nimitz and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender.” Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, was adamant: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” and generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall also opposed or had reservations about the atomic bombings

While most reporters, editors and columnists persist to this day in repeating the story that US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the Pacific, J. Samuel Walker, former chief historian for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wrote in the winter 1990 issue of the professional journal Diplomatic History: “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”

Of course the effort to reinforce the official reasons for the massacres included governmental censorship and secrecy. Greg Mitchell’s book “Atomic Cover-Up: Two US Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made” (Sinclair Books, 2011) recounts the 20 hours of color film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it was kept hidden for decades. Reporters were censored by US occupation forces, and photographs of human victims were confiscated, classified SECRET. Joseph Gerson’s book “Empire and the Bomb” (Pluto Press 2007) explains that the hush-up campaign had several goals: “to obscure the true reasons for the A-bombs; to limit understanding of the death and destruction wrought by the A-bombs; and to maintain popular support for continuing preparation and threats to initiate future nuclear wars.”

The government’s public rationalizations for incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki still dominate public opinion. In 2005, a Gallop poll reported that 57 percent of people surveyed in the US believed the bombings were justified and legitimate. The myth, although rejected by a consensus of informed scholars, retains its usefulness. President Obama’s proposed 30-year, trillion-dollar program to rebuild the nuclear weapons production establishment can only go ahead if taxpayers hold fast to the belief that something good can somehow come from the mass destruction of civilians.

Filed Under: Nuclear Weapons, Weekly Column

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