Wednesday
Jul252018
Entries by admin (2761)
July 25, 2018Thursday
Jul192018
Sample comments you can use to write your own for submission to NRC in opposition to Holtec's CISF in s.e. NM
SAMPLE COMMENTS you can use to prepare your own, for expressing opposition to the Holtec International/Eddy-Lea [Counties] Energy Alliance's proposal to "park" 173,600 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico, are posted at Beyond Nuclear's website.
Instructions for how to submit your comments are are viewable by clicking here.
The easiest comment submission mechanism is email: Holtec-CISFEIS Resource <Holtec-CISFEIS@nrc.gov>
Please include “Docket ID NRC–2018–0052” in your comment submission, such as in the subject line of your e-comments.
(Another convenient, efficient, way to submit comments is via Public Citizen's webform, here.
NIRS has also set up a quick and easy action page for submitting comments online, here.)
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has set the public comment deadline for July 30th. Please submit your comments by then. And please spread the word far and wide about this important action alert!
The scheme could result in a de facto permanent, surface storage, "parking lot" dump amidst Hispanic communities in the Texas/New Mexico borderlands. These communities are already badly polluted by toxic fossil fuel, and radioactive nuclear, industrial activities. This "nuclear sacrifice zone" environmental injustice, or radioactive racism, must be stopped!
If opened, the Holtec/ELEA centralized interim storage facility (CISF) would launch unprecedented thousands, or even tens of thousands, of highly radioactive waste shipments -- by truck, train, and/or barge, on roads, rails, and/or waterways, through most states -- over the course of several long decades.
Wednesday
Jul182018
Beyond Nuclear presses NRC to compel “autopsy” of closed reactors: Oyster Creek to close September 17, 2018
Beyond Nuclear is pressing the call for an “autopsy” of New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear power station and other decommissioning commercial power reactors in the United States. Beyond Nuclear covered the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public meeting in Forked River, NJ with the operator, Exelon Generation, to lay out their decommissioning options. Exelon is considering "mothballing" for 50-years following the September 17 2018 closure. Oyster Creek is the nation’s oldest nuclear power station. The 49-year old GE Mark I boiling water reactor on Barnegat Bay, is the first and oldest Fukushima-style reactor in the world. Exelon has previously said it could seek to mothball Oyster Creek for up to 50 years before beginning a ten-year dismantlement and decommissioning operation. While shutting down its oldest GE reactor, Exelon has applied to NRC for a second license renewal (60 to 80-year extension) of two of its other GE Mark I reactors at Peach Bottom units 2 and 3 in Pennsylvania. A post-shutdown autopsy to harvest aged material samples from Oyster Creek for scientifically analyze is necessary to assess the material damage on safety margins in aging nuclear power plants seeking dramatic license extensions. More on nuclear autopsies…
Tuesday
Jul172018
Ohio nuclear plants get stricter scrutiny after safety system problems
As reported by Kathiann M. Kowalski in Midwest Energy News. Beyond Nuclear's radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps, is quoted in the article.
Working with local grassroots allies, such as Toledo attorney Terry Lodge, and Don't Waste Michigan's Michael Keegan -- both several decades long watch-dogs on Davis-Besse -- Beyond Nuclear challenged the 2017-2037 license extension. NRC rubber-stamped it nonetheless.
A major issue cited was Davis-Besse's severe and ever-worsening concrete containment Shield Building cracking.
See Beyond Nuclear's backgrounders, re: Davis-Besse's many close calls with catastrophe, as well as re: its Shield Building cracking.
Monday
Jul162018
Trinity downwinders seek recognition and compensation
Today, July 16, also marks the anniversary of the 1945 Trinity atomic test. Shockingly, those downwind in New Mexico, the same state in which the bomb was detonated, have never been recognized as affected and never compensated. Beyond Nuclear went with a delegation to Capitol Hill when they finally got their Senate hearing.
Read our story on Beyond Nuclear International.
"When Barbara Kent was twelve years old she went away to dance camp. It was July 1945. A dozen young girls were enjoying a summer retreat, sleeping together in a cabin, and sharing their love of dance. On July 16 they danced with something deadly.
After being jolted unexpectedly out of bed, they went outside pre-dawn when it should have been dark, to find it bright as day with a strange white ash falling like snowflakes. “Winter in July,” Kent, now 86 years old, has called it.
The girls rubbed the “snowflakes” on their bodies and caught them with their tongues. Before they all turned 40, 10 of the 12 girls had died.
No one had warned the girls, or their teacher, or anyone in the community, that the US government had just exploded the first atomic bomb a little more than 50 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, now known as the Trinity Test Site. The “snowflakes” were deadly radioactive fallout and just the beginning of an endless — and likely permanent — cycle of disease, death and deprivation.
“While it was not the end of the world, it was the beginning of the end for so many people,” said Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, an organization that “seeks justice for the unknowing, unwilling and uncompensated participants of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test in southern New Mexico.”