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ARTICLE ARCHIVE

Radioactive Waste

No safe, permanent solution has yet been found anywhere in the world - and may never be found - for the nuclear waste problem. In the U.S., the only identified and flawed high-level radioactive waste deep repository site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada has been canceled. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an end to the production of nuclear waste and for securing the existing reactor waste in hardened on-site storage.

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Entries by admin (643)

Thursday
Apr112013

Contact White House and Members of Congress -- urge them to put the brakes on unprecedented, high-risk shipment of LIQUID high-level radioactive waste

An infrared photo of solid irradiated nuclear fuel being shipped by rail. Liquid high-level radioactive waste could have a similar thermal -- as well as radiological -- "signature," if heat-generating radioactive isotopes are retained in the solution.

[Dr. Gordon Edwards has penned a Resolution Against the Transportation of Liquid [High-Level] Radioactive Wastes.

In just a single week, nearly 50 groups -- including Beyond Nuclear -- have endorsed the resolution.

Dr. Edwards welcomes additional organizations to endorse as well. If your group would like to endorse the resolution, please email your full contact information to Dr. Edwards at ccnr@web.ca.]

Unprecedented high-risk shipment of LIQUID high-level radioactive waste approved by Obama White House (April 1 to 5)

Background links on the shipment of LIQUID high-level radioactive waste, containing HEU, from Chalk River, Ontario to SRS, USA (ongoing updates, check back for new entries as time goes on)

Please contact President Obama, your U.S. Senators, and your U.S. Representative, and urge them to stop this unprecedented high-risk shipment of liquid HLRW! You can be patched through to your Members of Congress via the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at: (202) 224-3121. President Obama can be contacted by calling the White House at 202-456-1111, writing him online via the White House web form, or writing him at: President Obama; The White House; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW; Washington, DC 20500.
Beyond Nuclear urged members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to question President Obama's nominee for Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, about this issue during his April 9th confirmation hearing.
Friday
Apr052013

Unprecedented, high-risk shipment of liquid high-level radioactive waste approved by Obama White House

An infrared photo of solid irradiated nuclear fuel being shipped by rail. Liquid high-level radioactive waste could have a similar thermal -- as well as radiological -- "signature," if heat-generating radioactive isotopes are retained in the solution.Liquid high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) has never been shipped in North America, according to Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

But, thanks to the vigilant watchdogging of the Savannah River Site (SRS) nuclear weapons complex, by FOE's Tom Clements in South Carolina, we now know that the Obama White House has approved a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plan to rush such shipments from Chalk River in Ontario, Canada to South Carolina for reprocessing.

As Dr. Edwards' backgrounder (see below) points out, the driving motivation seems to be, not nuclear weapons non-proliferation (as the Obama administration and DOE are trying to claim (the liquid HLRW contains potentially weapons-usable HEU, highly enriched uranium), but rather the Canadian government's attempt to save money, and bother, by paying DOE $60 million to simply take it off their hands, and ship it to SRS. For its part, SRS hopes to keep its dirty, dangerous, and expensive reprocessing capability on life support. The multiple, high-risk shipments could cross the border in the Northeast, New York, and/or Michigan, and cross numerous states before reaching South Carolina.

Please contact President Obama, your U.S. Senators, and your U.S. Representative, and urge them to stop this unprecedented high-risk shipment of liquid HLRW! If your U.S. Senator serves on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, urge him or her to ask Ernest Moniz about the risks of these proposed shipments during his Senate confirmation hearing for DOE Secretary. If your neither of your Senators serve on the ENR Committee, urge them to urge their colleagues who do to ask the question. You can be patched through to your Members of Congress via the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.
President Obama can be contacted by calling the White House at 202-456-1111, writing him online via the White House web form, or writing him at: President Obama; The White House; 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW; Washington, DC 20500.
BACKGROUND

On April 1, 2013,  Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility wrote the following "Note to everyone concerned about the shipment of high-level liquid radioactive waste from Chalk River [Ontario, Canada] to Savannah River [Site, South Carolina]":
Tom Clements [Friends of the Earth, Columbia, SC] has been notified by telephone today that the US DOE has determined, through a "supplementary analysis" (with no public input) that there is no need for a "supplementary environmental assessment" as requested by Tom some time ago.

Such a supplementary EA would have at least delayed the project for six months or so, while giving the public an opportunity to intervene in this dossier.

Tom was told that the US Government has now approved these shipments -- and that the approval has come from the White House, justified as part of Obama's non-proliferation initiative -- via Laura Holgate, the same woman who was in charge of the weapons-grade-plutonium-into-reactor-fuel (MOX) program previously. (She played an important role in the shipment of weapons-grade plutonium to Chalk River from Los Alamos for testing the use of MOX ("mixed oxide") fuel in CANDU reactors.)

There will be a short notice sent to some press and interested individuals very soon (perhaps even today or tomorrow [April 1 or 2]) that approval for the shipments has been given.  So at this point either the US decision will have to be challenged in court or the Canadian approval process will have to be delayed and opened up if there is to be any chance of public intervention.

It seems clear that the "non-proliferation" goal of repatriating weapons-grade uranium is being subverted for other purposes.

On the US side, the main goal of the Savannah River management is to keep the H-canyon reprocessing facility running -- it has been very difficult for them to get enough business to keep the reprocessing plant running.  On the Canadian side it is cheaper to pay $60 million to send the contents of the FISST tank down to the US than to deal with those wastes on-site.

Important points to bear in mind:

(a) High-level radioactive LIQUID waste has never been transported over public roads and bridges in North America up to now.

(b) The 23,000 litres of high-level radioactive liquid waste that is supposed to be shipped from Chalk River down to Savannah River (almost 2000 km) is all from one tank -- the Fissile Solution Storage Tank (FISST).  But the use of this tank has been discontinued since 2003....

(c) The liquid in the FISST tank is a fiercely radioactive solution of nitric acid containing many fission products including cesium-137 and strontium-90, several transuranic elements including plutonium and americium, and residual amounts of weapons-grade uranium-235.  This material gives off deadly levels of penetrating gamma radiation for centuries and will remain highly radiotoxic for hundreds of millennia, long after the gamma radiation has died down.

(d) The high-level radioactive liquid solution that used to be added to the FISST tank was waste left over from the production of medical isotopes; that same liquid material is still being produced at Chalk River from isotope production, but now the liquid is being solidified by a "cementation" process instead of being stored in a liquid form.

(e) In addition to the FISST tank, there is a "tank farm" at Chalk River containing 13 other tanks of liquid radioactive waste -- and this liquid waste is already being solidified by AECL [Atomic Energy of Canada, Limited] using a process of cementation.

(f) So there are a number of important questions that have not been dealt with:
 
 (1) If Chalk River has been solidifying other liquid wastes and will continue to do so, why are they not solidifying the contents of the FISST tank?

 (2) If, for the last ten years (2003-2013) Chalk River has been solidifying liquid HLW containing HEU, why is DOE content to have AECL store that material onsite but is not content to have AECL continue to store (solidified or not) the liquid contents of the FISST tank?

 (3) Since HEU is weapons-grade material the risk of a criticality accident (a spontaneous chain reaction) will become increasingly worrisome as the liquid in the tank is being "drawn down"; how is this to be analyzed and prevented?

 (4) Since HLW in liquid form is extremely mobile in the environment and since the existing Environmental Assessment documents for shipping HEU-bearing irradiated fuel makes no mention of shipping liquid HLW, how is it possible that a supplementary EIS is not required?

Gordon Edwards.
Wednesday
Mar272013

Environmental coalition defends contentions against Fermi 3 proposed new reactor, challenges adequacy of NRC FEIS

Environmental coalition attorney Terry LodgeTerry Lodge (photo, left), Toledo-based attorney representing an environmental coalition opposing the proposed new Fermi 3 atomic reactor targeted at the Lake Erie shore in Monroe County, MI, has filed a reply to challenges from Detroit Edison (DTE) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff.

The coalition's reply re-asserted "no confidence" in DTE's ability to safely stored Class B and C "low-level" radioactive wastes on-site at Fermi 3 into the indefinite future, due to the lack of sure access to a disposal facility. it also again emphasized the lack of documented need for the 1,550 Megawatts of electricity Fermi 3 would generate. And the coalition alleged that NRC has failed to fulfill its federal responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), as by the illegal "segmentation" of the needed transmission line corridor from the rest of the Fermi 3 reactor construction and operation proposal.

This legal filing follows by a week upon the submission of public comments about NRC's Fermi 3 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). The comments, commissioned by Don't Waste Michigan and prepared by Jessie Pauline Collins, were endorsed by a broad coalition of individuals and environmental groups, including Beyond Nuclear. The FEIS comments included satellite images of harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie in 2012, and in 2011 to 2012, attributable in significant part to thermal electric power plants such as Detroit Edison's Monroe (coal burning) Power Plant, at 3,300 Megawatts-electric the second largest coal burner in the U.S. Fermi 3's thermal discharge into Lake Erie will worsen this already very serious ecological problem.

In the very near future, the environmental coalition intervening against the Fermi 3 combined Construction and Operating License Application (COLA) will submit additional filings on its contentions challenging the lack of adequate quality assurance (QA) on the project, as well as its defense of the threatened Eastern Fox Snake and its critical wetlands habitat. The State of Michigan has stated that Fermi 3's construction would represent the largest impact on Great Lakes coastal wetlands in the history of state wetlands preservation law. 

Thursday
Mar072013

Plan to ship Hanford leaked waste to WIPP decried

"This is a bad, old idea that's been uniformly rejected on a bipartisan basis by politicians when it came up in the past, and it's been strongly opposed by citizen groups like mine and others," said Don Hancock, a member of the watchdog group Southwest Research and Information in Albuquerque. "It's also clear that it's illegal." Hancock was commenting on federal plans to ship some of the radioactive waste from Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reserve to New Mexico, a plan supported by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D). Both states will need to approve the plan. Six of the Hanford tanks holding radioactive sludge from nuclear weapons production have been found to be leaking intro groundwater. The plan would mean shipping 3 million gallons of radioactive waste from Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.

Thursday
Feb282013

Hanford's radioactive leaks should not be exploited to enact commercial Mobile Chernobyl legislation 

Hanford tanks under constructionIn 2002, George W. Bush's Energy Secretary, Spence Abraham, shamelessly exploited the 9/11 terrorist attacks in order to push the nuclear power industry's agenda -- ironically rushing the huge security risk of road, rail, and barge shipments of high-level radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain, Nevada for permanent burial. He argued before a congressional hearing panel that permanently closed atomic reactors, such as Big Rock Point in Michigan, needed to move their irradiated nuclear fuel to a single, consolidated storage site -- Yucca Mountain -- as soon as possible, as a homeland security priority. They didn't get away with it -- the Obama administration has wisely canceled the Yucca Mountain dump proposal.

However, the nuclear power industry, and its friends in government, are now pushing "centralized interim storage" -- moving commercial irradiated nuclear fuel to "parking lot dumps" at places like Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, NM; Savannah River Site, SC; Native American reservations; or nuclear power plants, like Dresden in IL.

Once again, permanently closed nuclear power plants, including Big Rock Point in Michigan, are being used, in an attempt to justify an expedicted "pilot" centralized interim storage facility. This time, Obama's resigning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, and U.S. Senators such as Lamar Alexander (R-TN, Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, Chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK, Ranking Member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee), are leading the charge. They argue that permanently closed nuclear power plants need to be able to move their high-level radioactive wastes, in storage in dry casks, so these parcels of land can be released for "un-restricted re-use." This argument ignores the significant radioactive contamination of soil, groundwater, flora, fauna, and surface water sediments at these sites, despite decommissioning efforts costing hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars. Big Rock Point itself has lingering plutonium, and other radioactive, contamination, calling into very serious question the site's "un-restricted re-use" for residential development, a state park, or anything else.

These supposedly "interim" facilities could easily become de facto permanent surface storage sites, if a deep geologic repository is never opened. The now thankfully canceled Private Fuel Storage, Limited Liability Corporation (PFS LLC) parking lot dump targeted at the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians Reservation in Utah is a cautionary tale in this regard. If scores of rail-sized containers of Maine Yankee wastes had been moved to PFS, when the Yucca dump was canceled, they would have had to be "returned to sender" in Maine -- 4,000 miles of round trip risks through many states, which would have accomplished absolutely nothing.

Even if a deep geologic repository is opened someday, the centralized interim storage wastes would have to be moved, yet again, unnecessarily multiplying transport risks. If the repository is located back in the direction from which the wastes came in the first place, this would also represent needless round trip transport risks. In a recent letter to the editor to the Washington Post, Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps warned about the risks of playing a radioactive waste shell game like this on our nation's roads, rails, and waterways.

There is the political danger, as Spence Abraham did in the aftermath of 9/11, that the recently announced high-level radioactive waste leaks from six Hanford Nuclear Reservation underground storage tanks in Washington State -- posing a severe risk to the nearby Columbia River -- could be twisted, in an attempt to create public panic, in order to rush the enactment of centralized interim storage legislation.

However, as Beyond Nuclear has warned in an action alert, Hanford's leaking wastes must be stabilized on-site as a top priority. As Washington State Governor Jay Inslee has called for, leaking tanks must transer their wastes into brand new, state of the art storage tanks, as soon as possible. And the liquid and sludge high-level radioactive wastes must be solidified (vitrified) into glass logs, to maximize the wastes' stability over the longer term. Vitrified glass logs, encased in steel canisters, would be the form in which the high-level radioactive wastes would be someday transported away from Hanford, to a deep geologic repository, where they would be permanently buried.

Just as Hanford's military high-level radioactive wastes must be stabilized first, before transport away, so too must commercial irradiated nuclear fuel, stored on-site at reactors, be safeguarded and secured, as soon as possible. For more than a decade, hundreds of environmental groups have called for Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). HOSS calls for the emptying of extremely vulnerable storage pools, and the design and fabrication of quality dry casks that are safeguarded against accidents, fortified against attacks, and built to last for centuries without leakage of high-level radioactive waste into the living environment.

Beyond Nuclear's Paul Gunter is currently on a speaking tour of the Pacific Northwest. He will visit the Columbia Generating Station (CGS) located immediately adjacent to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as part of Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" campaign. CGS is a General Electric Mark II Boiling Water Reactor, similar in design to the Mark Is which melted down, exploded, and have released catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan.

Paul will also speak as a panelist at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon this weekend. Hanford's recently revealed radioactive leaks will be a hot topic of conversation, for sure!

Please urge your U.S. Senators and Representative to block centralized interim storage legislation, which would launch unprecedented numbers of potential Mobile Chernobyls onto the roads, rails, and waterways. You can phone your Members of Congress via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121, or write them a letter, send them a fax, or email them by finding their contact information at their websites. The most effective way to influence your Members of Congress is to meet with them (or their staff) face to face. Consider coming to ANA's DC Days April 14-17, or arrange a meeting with your Members of Congress's district office nearest you!

As but the latest sign that Mobile Chernobyl's engines are revving on Capitol Hill, U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) told reporters yesterday that centralized interim storage nuclear waste legislation will be drafted in the near future. Sen. Wyden toured Hanford on Feb. 19th in the aftermath of the leaks being revealed, and ordered a Government Accountability Office investigation of matters at Hanford. Sen. Wyden also donned a radiation protection suit in April 2012 and toured the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Upon his return to Capitol Hill, he called on the full resources of the U.S. government to be deployed to Japan to prevent an even greater catastrophe from unfolding at Fukushima Daiichi's Unit 4 high-level radioactive waste storage pool, at risk of a cooling water drain down and irradiated nuclear fuel fire.