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ARTICLE ARCHIVE

Canada

Canada is the world's largest exporter of uranium and operates nuclear reactors including on the Great Lakes. Attempts are underway to introduce nuclear power to the province of Alberta and to use nuclear reactors to power oil extraction from the tar sands.

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Entries by admin (358)

Monday
Jan162017

Environmental coalition legal challenge against unprecedented highly radioactive liquid waste shipments coming to a head in D.C.

Political cartoon by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News. Buffalo, NY, as well as Thousand Island, NY, are the two most likely border crossings for these shipments, although others could also be used. DOE has invoked security-related secrecy on the routing and timing of the shipments.A Canadian-U.S. environmental coalition, including Beyond Nuclear, has been resisting unprecedented shipments of highly radioactive liquid waste, from Chalk River, Ontario, Canada to Savannah River Site, South Carolina, U.S.A., since they were first announced in spring, 2013. Last August, the coalition filed a federal lawsuit, demanding an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be conducted. Various court filings have gone back and forth since, between the coalition and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

In the latest round of legal filings, on Jan. 10, 2017, attorneys for DOE and the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Defendants' Combined Reply in Support of their Motion to Strike and Opposition to Plaintiffs' Motion to Supplement the Record and to Submit Extra-Record Documents.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Terry Lodge of Toledo and Diane Curran of Washington, D.C., the environmental coalition's legal counsel, responded, filing Plaintiffs' Reply to Defendants' Opposition to Motion to Supplement the Record and to Submit Extra-Record Documents.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at 10am Eastern, Lodge and Curran will square off against DOE/DOJ, and argue the environmental coalition's case at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse, 333 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C. 20001.

If the environmental coalition prevails in the expedited legal proceeding, the court will order DOE to carry out a long overdue Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), significantly delaying or perhaps even aborting the truck shipments. If the DOE prevails, it could start trucking highly radioactive liquid wastes by mid-February, 2017. See Beyond Nuclear's Waste Transportation website section for more information.

Tuesday
Jan102017

OPG identifies most of Ontario as alternate 'location' to bury nuclear waste: Jennifer Wells

As reported by The Star of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 'Ontario Power Generation was asked by the federal government to identify "actual locations" as alternates for its plan to bury nuclear waste. It's now up to the minister as to whether they've done that.'

Remarkably, as reported by Jennifer Wells, business columnist at The Star:

OPG has defined two alternate locations — one a “crystalline” rock location, which OPG has used interchangeably with granite, and the other a sedimentary rock location. Fourteen GPS co-ordinates, including Ryden’s Border Store [in Grand Portage, Minnesota, U.S.A.] and a spot in Lake Erie, have been provided to define the first of these. When mapped, the 14 form the perimeter of this so-called “crystalline alternate location.” Plotted by the Star’s Matthew Cole, the result is a 726,052-square-kilometre land mass covering roughly 73 per cent of the province.

The article also reports:

Equally curious, the co-ordinates for the second alternate include a stately two story brick home in Chaplin Estates, near Yonge St. and Davisville Ave.

As reported by Seymour Real Estate, Chaplin Estates happens to offer "some of the most luxurious homes in Toronto" -- that is, the largest city in Canada. Ontario Power Generation should have known that, as it is headquartered in that very same city!

Suffice it to say, had this been a junior high science homework assignment, OPG would have earned a resounding F. It's high time for Canada's Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna, to flunk OPG's DUD (short for Deep Underground Dump)!

Wednesday
Jan042017

Beyond Nuclear media statement re: Ontario Power Generation’s doubling down on Great Lakes shoreline radioactive waste dump scheme

News from Beyond Nuclear

For Immediate Release, Jan. 4, 2017

Contact: Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog, Beyond Nuclear,

(240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org (Kamps also serves as board of directors member for Don’t Waste Michigan, representing the Kalamazoo chapter)

Media Statement of Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear,

re: Ontario Power Generation’s Doubling Down on Great Lakes Shoreline Radioactive Waste Dump Scheme

Takoma Park, Maryland—“Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has doubled down on its insane scheme to bury radioactive waste on the Great Lakes shoreline, and our Canadian-U.S. environmental coalition will redouble its efforts to stop it. We have resisted the DUD (short for Deep Underground Dump) for more than 15 years now, ever since OPG first declared this war on the future of the Great Lakes. After Flint, we won’t let them nuke the Great Lakes next!

OPG has refused to name the specific sites it has so hurriedly studied as alternative dumpsites to the Great Lakes shore, despite Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s explicit instructions in her request for additional information. For this reason alone, OPG must be given a failing grade, and its coveted Great Lakes shore DUD rejected outright.

OPG’s hypothetical alternative dumpsites analysis is all the more dubious, in that it was conducted in ten short months, as opposed to the 15 years it has spent targeting the Lake Huron shore at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Kincardine, Ontario, Canada.

As U.S. Representative Dan Kildee (Democrat-Flint) has stated, ‘Surely in the vast land mass that comprises Canada, there must be a better place to permanently store nuclear waste than on the shores of Lake Huron.’

In fact, Canada has the second largest land mass of any country, after Russia.

We thank Rep. Kildee, as well as Michigan’s U.S. Senators, Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, for leading the bipartisan congressional coalition opposing OPG’s Great Lakes radioactive waste dump.

OPG’s claim -- that a national Canadian high-level radioactive waste dump nearby, in addition to the proposed DUD for all of Ontario’s so-called “low” and “intermediate” level radioactive wastes -- would not represent significant cumulative environmental impacts, would be laughable, if it weren’t so seriously dangerous. Three municipalities near Kincardine, under the influence of OPG and Bruce Nuclear Generating Station inducements, are still in the running for Canada’s national high-level radioactive waste dump. This is an environmental injustice, given the adjacent Saugeen Ojibwe Nation (SON) territory, and other Native American First Nations' treaty rights downwind and downstream, such as to hunting and fishing.

And OPG’s false assurances, echoing the Joint Review Panel’s that rubber-stamped the DUD, that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) will oversee mitigation of cumulative environmental impacts over time at the DUD, is fatally flawed. CNSC, including its President, Michael Binder, is a completely captured agency, in collusion with the nuclear power industry it is supposed to regulate.

The Japanese Parliament concluded, after an independent investigation, that such collusion between regulators, the nuclear power industry, and elected officials, was the root cause of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. We must prevent a Fukushima on the Great Lakes shoreline!

As Beverly Fernandez, spokesperson for Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, has said, ‘Water is Life.’ Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump has been instrumental in securing 186 municipal resolutions, representing nearly 23 million residents in each Great Lakes state and province, opposing OPG’s so-called “Deep Geologic Repository” for “low” and “intermediate” level radioactive waste burial, or any radioactive waste dump in the Great Lakes Basin, including Canada’s national high-level radioactive waste dump.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s leadership in defense of the Missouri River, drinking water supply for 17 million people downstream in multiple states, against the risk of crude oil leaks from the Dakota Access Pipeline, is an inspiration. We must similarly protect the Great Lakes, against leaks of hazardous radioactivity from OPG’s DUD. After all, the Great Lakes are the drinking water supply for 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a large number of Native American First Nations. Not just is the drinking water supply for current generations put at risk by OPG’s DUD, but so too for all future generations, for radioactive waste is deadly forevermore. As the Sioux say, 'Mni Wiconi,' Water is Life!

OPG’s DUD is all the more unacceptable after the lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan via the drinking water supply. Lead and radioactivity have a lot in common. There is no safe level of exposure – any exposure carries a health risk. The higher the dose, the higher the risk. The risks accumulate over a lifetime. And children, especially the fetus in the mother’s womb, are the most vulnerable of all.

In fact, the very agencies of the U.S. federal and state governments responsible for the lead poisoning of 9,000 children in Flint via the drinking water supply – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his Michigan Department of Environmental Quality -- have yet to do anything to protect Michiganders and other Americans downstream against OPG’s Lake Huron shore radioactive waste dump scheme. Most ironically, now that Flint is again getting its drinking water supply from a safe, clean source – Lake Huron – OPG is threatening it with hazardous radioactive contamination.

And tellingly, the congressional leaders who have led the fight against the DUD -- Sens. Stabenow and Peters, and Rep. Kildee -- are the very congressional leaders who have worked so tirelessly to deliver long overdue funding to begin to heal the wounds in Flint.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s why we need to nip the DUD in the bud, before hazardous radioactivity ruins the Great Lakes drinking water supply forevermore.”

--30--

See Kamps’ essay, published at Counterpunch, entitled “After Flint, Don’t Nuke the Great Lakes Next!”

Based in Takoma Park, Maryland, U.S.A., Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abolish both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic.

Saturday
Dec242016

Binational environmental coalition defends its legal appeal, seeks to block Fermi 3 proposed new reactor in Michigan

Terry Lodge, legal counsel for the environmental coalition resisting Fermi 3

A Canadian-U.S. environmental coalition, including Beyond Nuclear, Citizen Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, and several other groups, is entering its 10th year of resistance (2008-2017) against Detroit Edison's proposed new Fermi Unit 3 reactor in southeast Michigan on the Great Lakes shoreline.

On Dec. 23rd, Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge filed a Reply Brief, in defense of a legal appeal originally filed in October, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second highest court in the land, just below the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Reply rebuts challenges to the appeal brought by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Detroit Edison (DTE).

The appeal challenges NRC's exclusion of the transmission line corridor from the Environmental Impact Statement, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The appeal also challenges DTE's violations of NRC's quality assurance (QA) regulations (Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates, Inc. serves as the coalition's QA expert).

More.

Wednesday
Dec212016

Coalition defends legal challenge against unprecedented high-risk truck shipments of highly radioactive liquid waste

Attorneys Terry Lodge of Toledo, OH, and Diane Curran of Washington, D.C., legal counsel for an environmental coalition that includes Beyond Nuclear, have filed a Reply Memorandum to the D.C. Circuit Court in defense of a lawsuit against unprecedented truck shipments of highly radioactive liquid waste (also referred to by the U.S. Department of Energy, obscurely, as irradiated target material, or, even more obscurely, as HEUNL, short for highly enriched uranyl nitrate liquid).

The 100 to 150 high-risk truck shipments would travel more than a thousand miles, from Chalk River Nuclear Lab, Ontario, Canada, to Savannah River Site, South Carolina, U.S.A. The shipments would most likely cross the international border at Buffalo or Thousand Islands, NY.

See the PLAINTIFFS' REPLY MEMORANDUM, here.

And see the related PLAINTIFFS' MOTION TO SUPPLEMENT THE RECORD, here.

More.