Great news! NRC admits Beyond Nuclear into Seabrook relicensing hearing

A federal licensing board of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted a petition filed by Beyond Nuclear to bring a law suit challenging NextEra Energy’s application to extend the operating license of its Seabrook nuclear power plant on the New Hampshire coast from 2030 to 2050. NextEra’s application is being submitted 20 years in advance of Seabrook’s current operating license’s expiration date. Beyond Nuclear is joined by the New Hampshire Sierra Club and the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League alleging that NextEra failed to meet its legal obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to evaluate less harmful energy alternatives. As much as 5000 megawatts electricity generated through interconnected offshore and deepwater wind power projects is scheduled to be operational in the Gulf of Maine by 2030. The combination of more interconnected wind energy farms deployed in deep water off the coast of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will be generating additional gigawatts of clean, safe, and affordable renewable electricity by the requested federal relicensing period. The licensing board agreed with Beyond Nuclear that there are "consequences" to filing a request for federal action nearly two decades in advance of the license expiration date. It is simply not reasonable or rational of the power company to say that renewable energy will not be feasible or commercially viable by 2030.

The federal licensing board also granted standing to the New England Coalition and Friends of the Coast and admitted three of four originally filed contentions regarding NextEra's lack of age management plans for miles of onsite buried electrical cables and power transformers and the misrepresentation of analysis for the amount of radiation released in a severe nuclear accident and its environmental and economic consequences.

The five petitioning groups will now seek to prevail against an onslaught of adversarial legal motions filed by both the power company and the NRC’s own Office of General Counsel to dismiss or whittle away the scope of the law suit. A public hearing before the three member NRC licensing board on these contentions could occur early in 2012.

Three states sue NRC over Nuclear Waste Con Game

The States of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut today filed lawsuits against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's December 2010 update to its Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule. NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence Game (a con game is any elaborate swindling operation in which advantage is taken of the confidence the victim reposes in the swindler) started in 1984 (appropriately enough, in the Orwellian sense), when NRC ruled that the generation of irradiated nuclear fuel was reasonable, given that it had "confidence" that a repository would open by 2007 to 2009. In 1990, NRC revised its "confidence" date to 2025, where it remained till the December update, when a date-certain was removed entirely. NRC's current con game holds that waste can remain safely stored on-site for at least 120 years (60 years of operations, and 60 years post-shutdown). However, the NRC Commissioners have ordered NRC staff to investigate "confidence" levels of "safe" storage on-site for much longer time periods, into the centuries. Of course, all this "confidence" willfully ignores the safety, security, and environmental risks of on-site pool storage and dry cask storage, none of which was designed to withstand severe terrorist attacks, for example. Three close calls to heavy load drops -- at Prairie Island, Palisades, and Vermont Yankee -- have risked sudden drain downs of pool cooling water, which would lead quickly to radioactive waste infernos unleashing up to 100% of the cesium-137 content of pools (tens of millions of curies, as compared to the 2.4 million curies of cesium-137 released at Chernobyl), according to NRC staff itself. A 2001 NRC pool fire study estimated that 25,000 people could die downwind of a pool fire from latent cancer, with deaths occurring as far downwind as 500 miles away. An earlier 1997 NRC study put the casualty figures much higher. The Attorneys General of NY, CT, and VT deserve tremendous thanks for this long overdue challenge to NRC's nuclear waste con game. A coalition of nearly 200 environmental groups has called since 2006 for "hardened on-site storage" as an interim safety and security measure to protest irradiated nuclear fuel from accidents and attacks. Calls have been ongoing for quality assurance upgrades on dry cask storage as well, to prevent radioactivity leaks over time from the concrete and/or steel silos that are located out in the open, exposed to the degrading impacts of the elements.

Obama energy budget could triple nuclear loan guarantees

President Obama's proposed 2012 energy budget would triple nuclear power loan guarantees from the $18.5 billion already appropriated to $54.5 billion. Obama is asking for an additional $36 billion in 2012 above the $18.5 billion. This mirrors a similar goal articulated in Obama's 2010 State of the Union address but successfully blocked last year. The budget also includes $67 million to develop designs for “small modular reactors." On the brighter side, a program that would study how to extract oil from tar sands was defunded. Beyond Nuclear remains on the front lines in efforts to block authorization and appropriation of loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants and we encourage all reading this to contact their Congressional representatives and urge them not to approve legislation that gives away this unnecessary nuclear pork at taxpayers' expense.

PLEASE ATTEND: Cancer committee meeting agenda posted

NAS has announced that the first committee meeting for analysis of cancer risks near NRC licensed facilities will be on February 24 and 25, 2011 at the Melrose Hotel, 2430 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC. Members of the public are welcome to attend the open session on Thursday, February 24, which will also be webcast. According to the current agenda, the public open session will be from 1 PM to 5:30 PM with public comments starting at 4:15. We encourage you to attend if you are able, and provide comments.

U.K. Nuclear-Free Local Authorities speak out against Canadian radioactive waste shipment

UK NFLA logo.In a media release, the U.K. Nuclear-Free Local Authorities have spoken out strongly against Bruce Power's proposed shipment of 16 radioactive steam generators, which would pass through Irish and British waters on their way to Studsvik Nuclear for so-called "recycling" in Sweden. In addition to contacting the British and Irish governments, the UK NFLA is also contacting the governments of Norway and Sweden to urge them to not approve the shipment entering their waters.