Beyond Nuclear's 28th set of comments, re: Docket ID NRC-2018-0052, re: NRC's Holtec/ELEA CISF DEIS
Submitted via: <holtec-cisfeis@nrc.gov>
Dear Holtec-CISFEIS Resource and NRC Staff,
This is Beyond Nuclear's 28th set of public comments in this proceeding.
I submit these comments on behalf of our members and supporters, not only in New Mexico, near the targeted Holtec/ELEA Laguna Gatuna site, but across New Mexico, and the rest of the country, along road, rail, and waterway routes that would be used for high risk, highly radioactive waste shipments to Holtec's CISF, as well as to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land -- illegally and improperly assumed by Holtec, as well as NRC, to someday become a permanent disposal repository.
Due especially to the numerous problems I have experienced submitting public comments via this <holtec-cisfeis@nrc.gov> email address, please acknowledge receipt of these comments, and please provide me with confirmation of their proper placement in the official public record for this proceeding.
This set of comments is in regards to process elements of the public comment proceeding, but also substance elements of the DEIS, and related documentation.
The first NRC call-in session was on June 23rd. The second NRC call-in session was on July 9th. Both times, I struggled for some time, inputting requested information, trying to get the NRC's WebEx webinar to work for me, all in vain. It never did. I finally gave up in frustration, and no longer even tried. I can only imagine how many others had the same problems as I did.
When struggling with NRC's WebEx system, specifically the NRC ICAM Authentication Gateway component, I continually got "Incorrect User ID or Password" error messages. I tried various combinations of the information that had been provided by the NRC in the announcements of the June 23 and July 9 meetings, to try to get past this hurdle, this locked gate, but never could figure it out, or else it simply was not working properly. Why is NRC's access to a public meeting online webinar so complicated, so much so that I could never figure it out? Or was it simply malfunctioning? I heard from numerous others that they encountered the same or similar frustrations.
As it turned out, the only thing the WebEx webinar really offered viewers was capability to see the slides of the NRC slideshow, as NRC staff advanced them during the meetings. Since so many people were having difficulty getting the WebEx to work on their computers, a work around was devised, by us, not by NRC. We got a hold of the NRC slideshow in PDF format, and simply shared it amongst our networks. That way, callers-in could advance the slides themselves, as NRC staffers made their presentations, following the audio by phone, as we were forced to do anyway.
It is very frustrating that the concerned public has to devise work arounds, when the NRC -- an agency which some years has had a billion dollar annual budget or more, and several thousands of well paid staffers -- cannot provide a webinar system that is user-friendly for members of the public. Most members of the public who have participated in these proceedings do so in a volunteer capacity. Most to all are U.S. taxpayers, by definition. Some 10% of NRC's massive annual budget is provided through federal taxpayer appropriations from Congress. The other 90% of NRC's massive annual budget comes from nuclear licensee user fees, the vast majority of those from commercial nuclear power plants. Many members of the public who have participated in these proceedings are also ratepayers, and if some of their electricity comes from nuclear generated electricity, then they are nuclear power electricity ratepayers, whose money, at least in part, ultimately contributes to NRC's massive annual budget. My point is, NRC must do better at its public participation proceedings, especially considering the relatively massive amounts of money -- almost all of it ultimately provided by U.S. taxpayers and nuclear power electricity ratepayers -- that the agency has to work with.
The first call-in verbal comment session was held on June 23rd. This was perhaps the most infamous one of all, because it was so very poorly run and executed.
That meeting went 5 hours and 15 minutes long. The single greatest problem was the very long delays between commenters -- sometimes as much as four to five minutes of dead silence, as NRC tried to get their system to work. NRC reported there were 400+ people on that call-in. By Beyond Nuclear's count, commenters that day were 35 opposed to Holtec's CISF, and 24 in favor, for a grand total that day of 59 commenters. NRC announced at one point that there were 80 people on the phone who wished to speak. If that was true, then 20+ people who wished to speak, were never able to. And judging by the count of commenters who were able to speak, the majority of those not able to speak would have been opposed to the Holtec CISF scheme. In fact, I personally have spoken to a number of people who waited the entire 5 hours and 15 minutes, wanting and intending to submit verbal comments (speak out against the Holtec CISF scheme), only to have NRC adjourn the meeting, without ever having called on them to speak.
That first meeting required pre-registration, a requirement that was then done away with for the next five meetings (all of which were simply call-in, then first come, first served, apparently). So those 20+ people who wished to speak, but were never allowed to, of the apparently 80 people that had pre-registered as required, may have been but the tip of the iceberg of opponents to the Holtec CISF, who wished to express their opposition in public comment form. It is hard to believe that some 320+ people in attendance on June 23rd simply wished to listen in, without themselves making public comments, the vast majority likely opposed to Holtec's CISF scheme.
This assertion is bolstered by our count of the anti-Holtec CISF commenters versus pro-Holtec CISF commenters:
By Beyond Nuclear's count, here is the break down from the public comment meetings --
Meeting Date..........Opponents to Dump..........Proponents in Favor of the Dump
June 23, 2020.........35..................................24
July 9, 2020............34..................................7
August 20, 2020......15..................................0
August 25, 2020......18..................................8
August 26, 2020......17..................................2
September 2, 2020...25.................................2
Grand Total.............134................................43
So, on June 23rd, only 59 of 80 who had pre-registered actually got their chance to make verbal comments. I assert that means that likely as many as HUNDREDS of commenters opposed to the dump, who wanted to make comments, did not get to speak that day.
The domination of each and every 2020 call-in session by opponents to Holtec's CISF mirrored the breakdown of the 2018 public comment meetings (all of which were in-person, save one which was mostly call-in, the one held at NRC HQ at which just one member of the public attended in-person, because NRC did little to no public outreach to even alert people of the opportunity to attend in-person), held as part of the environmental scoping phase.
As reported on May 24, 2018 by Beyond Nuclear on our website:
In Gallup, opponents outnumbered supporters by a count of 36 to 1; in ABQ, it was 63 to 6. Thus far, after a half-dozen public comment meetings, opponents have outnumbered supporters, 233 to 53, a nearly five-to-one ratio!
Thus, the trend continues in 2020, just as it did in 2018, that opponents to Holtec's CISF greatly outnumber proponents.
Adding up the grand totals of comments "at the microphone" during verbal comment sessions (whether in-person or by phone call-in/webinar, as in 2018, or via phone call-in exclusively in 2020), here is the grand total for both environmental scoping phase in 2018, and DEIS phase in 2020: 367 opposed to Holtec's CISF; 96 in favor of. Remarkably and tellingly, opponents of the CISF even outnumbered proponents in Holtec/ELEA's "company towns" of Carlsbad and Hobbs, at the in-person 2018 public comment meetings held there.
Therefore, the inability to actually make comments at meetings is unacceptable -- the vast majority of those comments, not allowed to be made, would likely have added to the opposition commentary, even significantly so. Ample opportunity for opponents to Holtec's CISF must be provided by NRC, and the June 23rd meeting did not do this.
I would point out that at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's comparable public participation sessions, the CNSC actually schedules a precise time slot in advance for each and every single commenter, in which their comments will be heard and recorded. That way, many hundreds of commenters do not have to wait through the entire hours-long or days-long proceedings, hoping (and fearing) they might be called next. (Fearing in the sense that if they happen to be away -- such as to get a drink, or use the restroom -- they might just miss their chance, even though they may have been waiting for hours already!) This way, commenters know when to show up to make their comments, and don't have to spend many long hours waiting, if they don't want to. Of course, they can listen to all comments, if they so choose, but they are not forced to, lest they risk missing their name being called to make their own comments.
But as mentioned above, NRC then abandoned pre-registration, and simply turned to a call-in, first come, first served approach for the next five meetings (actually making the change after the pre-registration requirement for the second meeting, on July 9th, had already been initially announced, increasing the confusion for members of the public who had followed NRC's instructions, only to have them thrown out the window at show time). Apparently, those who did pre-register for the second meeting, simply had their pre-registration cancelled. They, like everyone else, simply had to abide by the newly announced first come, first served policy.
I would now like to comment on the NRC's slideshow, presented during the June 23rd call-in/webinar. (NRC's slideshow seems to have changed/evolved -- or, in certain aspects, devolved, as will be discussed below -- over the course of the call-in sessions, so the slide numbers and descriptions below, refer to the June 23rd slideshow, as posted online here <https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2017/ML20175A106.pdf>, unless indicated otherwise.
Re: Slide #2, why are all the documents associated with the NRC DEIS -- not just the most basic summaries and introductory materials, such as general proceeding announcements -- also translated into Spanish? After all, Holtec is targeting an area of New Mexico where many communities are majority Hispanic/LatinX, and where a significant percentage of that population are Spanish speakers. Why isn't the entire DEIS translated into Spanish, then? It's the least NRC could do, given the environmental injustice represented by the Holtec CISF scheme, threatening Hispanic/LatinX southeastern NM.
Along the same lines, although a few basic documents were announced by NRC staff to have been translated into Navajo/Diné, as well, this begs the question, why not Tewa Pueblo? The Hopi have actively claimed land connections to Holtec's Laguna Gatuna site. Why not Mescalero Apache -- their reservation is not far from Holtec's targeted Laguna Gatuna site -- in fact, the Mescalero Apache Reservation was itself targeted for a CISF in the past, first by DOE's Nuclear Waste Negotiator, and then later by Private Fuel Storage, LLC, a consortium of nuclear power utility companies. Those attempts to dump on Mescalero Apache were blocked by efforts led by tribal members Rufina Marie Laws, Joe Geronimo, and others.
By the way, the CISF targeting Mescalero Apache, was led by Xcel Energy/Northern States Power. So any comments made by Xcel Energy, such as were made in Hobbs during the environmental scoping stage, should keep this in mind. Xcel/NSP is not a neutral party. They are very biased in favor of CISFs. Why? Because Xcel/NSP itself owns atomic reactors, as at Monticello and Prairie Island in MN. Xcel/NSP would love to offload the title and liability for the forever deadly irradiated nuclear fuel it has generated -- and made a filthy profit off of generating -- onto the DOE, that is, the American taxpaying public.
But besides only the most basic of documents being translated into Navajo/Diné, why hasn't the entire DEIS, and all related documentation, been translated into Navajo/Diné, Tewa Pueblo, Mescalero Apache, and other Native American languages (such as Comanche) of tribal nations that have connections to the land at or near the Laguna Gatuna site? Making this need all the more compelling is that in many, to most, to all, of these tribal cultures, the elders are held in very deep esteem by the entire community. It is an increased likelihood that some of these elders, whose wisdom is looked to by the entire tribal community for guidance, only speak their Native language. Why are these Native elders, and other Native community members who speak only their Native language, being denied access to the DEIS and all related, relevant related documents?
NRC's attitude -- that as little as a single, short letter, sent to the tribal council of various Native nations with land connections at or near the Laguna Gatuna site, is sufficient, is actually woefully insufficient. Meaningful government-to-government relations are what is required, honoring tribal nations' sovereignty, as well as treaty rights, but NRC has failed in this regard in a very substantial way.
Re: Slide #7, it reads, in part:
The NRC's Review Process...[is] Not to promote Holtec's proposal or the Consolidated Interim Storage Facility (CISF) concept.
Is the public really supposed to believe this? In previous public comments, I have told the story of Anthony Hsia, acting director of NRC's Division of Spent Fuel Management, at a Spent Fuel Project Office RegCon, who adjourned a two-day Regulatory Conference in Rockville, MD (held at the Hilton Washington D.C./Rockville Hotel) re: CISFs, by leading a pep rally-like cheer that "Together, we can get it [it meaning licensing, constructing, and operating CISFs] done!" NRC is supposed to be a safety regulator, not a policy developer or advocate, so Mr. Hsia's behavior was alarmingly inappropriate, in fact a frightening surface level symptom manifestation, of even deeper-rooted violations of NRC's legal mandate that are clearly going on.
NRC staff's bias in favor of the Holtec CISF was made clear by its advocacy in favor of Holtec's scheme and rationale, made to the ASLB in the licensing proceeding -- the NRC staff sometimes being "to the right" (more passionate and aggressive in its advocacy for the CISF's licensing) than the applicant itself!
ASLB's -- NRC's supposedly quasi-independent, quasi-judicial administrative law licensing authority -- own bias in favor of the Holtec CISF scheme was made clear, by its rapid fire, short order rejection of either the legal standing, or the merits of proposed legal and technical contentions for a hearing, or both, of every single intervenor opposed to the proposal. Scores of contentions were filed, all rapidly rejected by the ASLB in cursory fashion. Perhaps the most bitter rejections of all were vis-a-vis Alliance for Environmental Strategies' (AFES) contentions, and legal standing. AFES is a predominantly LatinX/Hispanic environmental justice (EJ) group in southeastern NM, opposed to Holtec's CISF. Not only did the ASLB reject the merits of AFES's EJ contentions -- summarily ruling them unworthy of a hearing -- the ASLB went so far as to not even acknowledge AFES's legal standing in the proceeding. Thus, not only is NRC staff's EJ analysis and conclusions in the DEIS bogus, but the ASLB's behavior was itself an EJ violation.
Certain ASLB judges' bias toward parties intervening against Holtec's CISF was so blatant, that it manifested in visibly scoffing in disapproval at intervenors' good faith legal and technical arguments.
ASLB's rush to terminate the licensing proceeding on May 7, 2019 -- less than four months after the oral argument pre-hearings held in Albuquerque -- resembled a shocking slamming of the door in the face of intervening parties. In fact, the ASLB's rush to terminate the licensing proceeding, was so very rushed, even the biased-in-favor-of-Holtec-and-CISF's NRC Commissioners, for their part, felt compelled to remand certain aspects of the proceeding back to the ASLB, to reconsider (which, in its bias, the ASLB then rejected all over again, in short order).
For one thing, how could the ASLB terminate the licensing proceeding, more than 10 months before the NRC DEIS was even published? This put the burden to re-open the licensing proceeding on intervenors, if and when they formulated new contentions based on new material information contained in the newly published NRC DEIS. This burdening of intervenors was unfair and unjust. Why didn't the ASLB just leave the licensing proceeding open, until DEIS-related contention-filing deadlines had passed?
The NRC Commissioners, for their part, demonstrated equally biased attitudes, in favor of Holtec's CISF application, and opposed to intervenors' arguments against the dump's licensing. For example, on April 23, 2020, the NRC Commissioners unanimously sided with the ASLB's rulings, entirely rejecting the legal standing and contentions of AFES, entirely rejecting the legal standing and contentions of Don't Waste Michigan, et al. (a nationwide grassroots environmental coalition comprised of 7 groups), and rejecting the contentions of Beyond Nuclear (although, like the ASLB, acknowledging its legal standing).
Although the NRC Commissioners remanded a very small number of contentions made by Fasken Oil and Ranch, Ltd./Permian Basin Land & Royalty Owners, and the Sierra Club, to the ASLB for reconsideration or further consideration, the ASLB then made short shrift of those remands, as mentioned above.
The NRC's (Staff's, ASLB's, and Commissioners') utter bias in favor of Holtec's proposal, and the CISF concept writ large, could not be made much more clear than all of this. Thus, NRC's slide was dishonest. To invoke the Parkland High School mass shooting survivors' slogan, "we call B.S.!"
Re: Slide #8, re: "NRC Accepts LA [License Application]," I would like to point out that NRC accepted Holtec's LA, and announced the commencement of the licensing proceeding, in the Federal Register, on July 16, 2018. July 16 just so happens to be a day of nuclear infamy in New Mexico, twice over. July 16, 1945 saw the explosion of the Trinity nuclear weapon test blast, in the Tularosa Basin. As Bob Alvarez and Kitty Tucker wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the lead up to this year's 75th annual commemoration of that radiological catastrophe for the Tularosa Basin, and beyond, the first Downwinders of the Atomic Age to die, the first fatalities of nuclear weapons, were not just Japanese residents in/near Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but New Mexican babies. Tucker and Alvarez carefully documented the statistically significant increase in infant mortality downwind of the Trinity blast in New Mexico, as should have been expected when so much hazardous radioactivity was purposefully unleashed into the environment. The suffering of the Tularosa Downwinders -- unacknowledged, and uncompensated, as with health care assistance -- continues today, 75 years later, a national shame.
As Ian Zabarte of Native Community Action Council has pointed out, the killing caused by Trinity was also done in absolute secrecy, by the Manhattan Project and U.S. military. The secrecy was then continued by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and even the U.S. Department of Energy. The secrecy makes the killing even more reprehensible.
But July 16th also marks the annual commemoration of the Church Rock, NM uranium mill tailings dam breach and spill into the Puerco River, used by Navajo/Diné shepherds as their sole source of drinking water and irrigation water for their sheep flocks. This very large-scale discharge of hazardous radioactive substances into the surface environment -- one of the single worst in U.S. history -- is to this day little known. Little to no cleanup was ever done. No compensation nor health care was ever offered.
These nuclear tragedies and catastrophes are remembered, and commemorated annually, still in New Mexico -- in large part, because the suffering continues, unabated. For NRC to choose consciously/on purpose, or more likely to choose unconsciously/ignorantly/"accidentally", to announce the commencement of the monstrously environmentally unjust/environmentally racist/radioactively racist Holtec CISF licensing proceeding on July 16, 2018 -- of any single day on the calendar -- is a clear reflection of NRC's shameful, ghoulish tone deafness, if nothing else.
Re: Slide #23, there was a cartoonish/oversimplified transport route map depicted. By cartoonish, I refer to the three straight-as-an-arrow lines, showing inbound import routes for irradiated nuclear fuel, to the Holtec CISF site, from three different parts of the U.S. Also shown is a straight-arrow-line to the highly controversial, in fact cancelled and not-going-to-happen, Yucca Mountain permanent repository in Nevada. What's cartoonish about it is, actual road and rail routes, not to mention barge shipment routes, can actually be quite circuitous. They are certainly not straight-as-an-arrow. And of course, there are 129 extant, and 2 under construction, commercial atomic reactor sites in the U.S. Those three inbound routes do not account for the sprawling spider web of routes that would actually be used by heavy-haul trucks, barges, and trains, to haul highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel, from 131 discrete atomic reactor sites in the U.S., to the Holtec CISF, located between Lagunas Gatuna and Plata in southeastern NM.
What's ironic is, there is no such transport route map -- not even a cartoonish, oversimplified one -- in the DEIS itself. In Holtec's own Environmental Report, as part of its CISF license application, there is but one single transport route map, woefully inadequate as it is: Figure 4.9.1: TRANSPORTATION ROUTES FOR SNF [SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL], found on Page 4-40 in Rev. (Revision) 0. But at least Holtec did include a single transport route map, woefully inadequate as it was (it only accounted for transport routes inbound to the CISF from 4 atomic reactors in the U.S., 1 at Maine Yankee, and 3 at San Onofre, CA; there are 129 existing atomic reactor sites in the U.S., and 2 more under construction, for a total of 131; what about the other 127 atomic reactor sites?!). NRC did not include even that much visual information, such as a route map!
Compare this to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) performance, such as with the Feb. 2002 Final EIS for the Yucca Mountain repository, as well as its 2008 Final Supplemental EIS for the Yucca Mountain repository. The Feb. 2002 FEIS provided extensive transport routing and shipment number data, including detailed maps for all atomic-reactor-to-Yucca-dump routes. In fact, the material got its own appendix in the document, Appendix J, Transportation. The routing maps included not only road and rail routes, but also barge shipment routes on waterways. There is no comparable coverage in NRC's Holtec CISF DEIS. Such information is simply entirely missing.
Compare NRC's performance to DOE's 2008 document mentioned above. DOE's 2008 document was comprehensive enough to allow the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects to publish the following route maps and shipment number information, making it even more user-friendly for the general public:
2017 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects - Representative Transportation Routes to Yucca Mountain and Transportation Impacts (Cask Shipments by State) - Fred Dilger PhD
- Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects - Cities Potentially Affected by Shipments to Yucca Mountain (pdf-2.45M)
- Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects - States Potentially Affected by Shipments to Yucca Mountain with Congressional Districts (pdf-7.05M)
- Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects - Congressional Districts Potentially Affected by Shipments to Yucca Mountain - 115th Congress (pdf-882K)
September 22, 2020