NRC licensing board blocks Massachusetts from challenging Pilgrim license extension

NRC file photo of Pilgrim, located 38 miles southeast of Boston; its 40 year operating license expires June 8, 2012The New York Times reports that a panel of three administrative law judges at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has rejected a bid by the State of Massachusetts to challenge the Pilgrim nuclear power plant's license extension by requiring "lessons learned" from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe to be applied. Both Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 to 4 and Pilgrim share the same reactor design, the General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor. Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" emergency enforcement petition to NRC calls for the immediate shut down of Pilgrim and 22 additional Mark 1s operating across the U.S. NRC has rubberstamped 71 reactor license extensions in the past 12 years. Mary Lampert at Pilgrim Watch has led the grassroots effort challenging the 20 year license extension at Pilgrim, keeping the proceeding alive for 6 years, a record.

Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" emergency enforcement petition, joined by over 8,000 groups and individuals, also pointed out that Mark 1 pools are vulnerable to gradual boil downs or sudden drain downs which could result in catastrophic high-level radioactive waste fires, which very well may have occurred at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4, prompting NRC to order Americans to flee at least 50 miles away in the earliest days of the catastrophe. Pilgrim's pool contains all the high-level radioactive waste ever generated there over the past several decades, more than Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 to 4's pools combined.

TransCanada Pipelines also a large-scale radioactive waste generator!

Bruce nuclear power plant, part owned by TransCanada PipelinesCongratulations to environmental allies who have successfully pressured the Obama administration to postpone -- and hopefully ultimately cancel -- TransCanada Pipelines' proposed Keystone XL Pipeline for Canadian tar sands crude oil. But tar sands crude oil isn't the only "dirty, dangerous, and expensive" energy source TransCanada dabbles with. According to its website, it also owns 48.8% of the 3,000 Megawatt-electric (MW-e) Bruce A nuclear power plant, and 31.6% of the 3,200 MW-e Bruce B nuclear power plant. Bruce -- a 9 reactor and radioactive waste complex located in Ontario on the shore of Lake Huron just 50 miles from Michigan -- is the largest nuclear power plant in the Western Hemisphere, and the second biggest in the world. TransCanada entered the nuclear power business despite warnings by NIRS in late 2002 about serious financial and environmental risks.

A primary bone of contention over the Keystone XL pipeline is its proposed route over the irreplacable Ogallala Aquifer; the Waste Control Specialists radioactive waste dump in Texas also threatens the Ogallala. For its part, TransCanada's Bruce nuclear complex already comprises one of the biggest concentrations of radioactive waste in the world. Bruce proposes an incredible 2,000 dry casks for storing high-level radioactive waste on-site, generated by its own multiple reactors. It is embroiled in a raging controversy over proposed radioactive waste shipments on the Great Lakes. And it is targeted to become a permanent burial dump for "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes from a whopping 20 reactors across Ontario -- the "Deep Underground Dump," or DUD, as Greenpeace Canada's Dave Martin dubbed it. The DUD would be located just a half mile from the Lake Huron shoreline. The Great Lakes provide drinking water for 40 million people in the U.S., Canada, and numerous Native American First Nations.

No emergency procedures in place if crises arise in high-level radioactive waste storage pools

In a video entitled "Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Dont Want You to Know" posted at the Fairewinds Associates website, nuclear engineers Dave Lochbaum of Union of Concerned Scientists and Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds explain what went wrong at Fukushima Daiichi, then show how similar catastrophes can happen right here in the U.S., not only in General Electric boiling water reactors of the Mark 1 containment design, but in any atomic reactor. The event, sponsored by C-10 and other environmental groups, took place in June 2011 at the Boston Public Library.

At one point, Dave Lochbaum explains that there are no procedures in place for nuclear power plant personnel to follow during a crisis involving a high-level radioactive waste storage pool. The upside, he joked, is if such safety regulations don't exist, then at least the industy can't violate them. The downside, of course, is a pool accident could unleash catastrophic quantities of hazardous radioactivity onto the waves and winds, to contaminate people and ecosystems downwind and downstream.

NRC reports that 63 sites in U.S. already have dry cask storage installed

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published a map, dated November 2010, showing that 63 nuclear power plant sites in 33 states -- both operating and permanently closed plants included -- already have dry cask storage installed for high-level radioactive waste. Another 10 sites have applied for permission to install dry cask storage. Only 11 sites in the entire country, storing high-level radioactive waste in indoor pools, have yet to apply to NRC for permission to construct an "independent spent fuel storage installation" or ISFSI -- dry cask storage. As shown in the NRC graph at the left, almost all pools in the U.S. will be full to capacity by 2015, requiring dry cask storage if those reactors are to continue generating high-level radioactive waste.

GAO confirms that dry casks may need to be replaced every century, at huge monetary cost, to prevent radioactivity leaks due to degradation

On page 39 of a 2009 report comparing costs of permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, versus parking lot dumps, versus very long term (up to 500 years) of on-site storage at nuclear power plants, GAO reported: "...our models generated cost ranges from $20 billion to $97 billion for the on-site storage of 153,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste for 100 years followed by geologic disposal. For only on-site storage for 100 years without disposal, costs would range from $10 billion to $26 billion for 70,000 metric tons of waste and from $13 billion to $34 billion for 153,000 metric tons of waste. On-site storage costs would increase significantly if the waste were stored for longer periods—storing 153,000 metric tons on site for 500 years would cost from $34 billion to $225 billion—because it would have to be repackaged every 100 years for safety." And given that shut down nuclear power plants will have dismantled their "wet storage" indoor pools, a new "repackaging" facility will need to be built to carry out such transfer safely, behind thick radiation shielding. How much will that cost? At page 55, GAO assumed that "Construction of a transfer facility for repackaging" will cost a whopping "$300 million plus or minus 50 percent (for either a wet or a dry transfer facility)," per nuclear power plant site! So much for nuclear power being "too cheap to meter" -- how about "too expensive to matter"?! Of course, once the high-level radioactive wastes exist, they have to be isolated from the environment, no matter the monetary cost -- to allow them to leak would cause incalcuable, unacceptable damage to health and environment, "downwind and downstream" (both physically, and temporally). Incredibly, Figure 12 on page 73 of the report shows the following:

"Figure 12 shows the present value of the total cost ranges of storing the nuclear waste on site over 2,000 years. The shaded areas indicate the probability that the values fall within the indicated ranges and are the result of combinations of uncertainties from a large number of input data. Specifically, we estimate that these costs could range from $34 billion to $225 billion over 500 years, from $41 billion to $548 billion over 1,000 years, and from $41 billion to $954 billion over 2,000 years, indicating a substantial level of uncertainty in making long-term cost projections."