NIW: "The Palisades Embrittlement Battle"

Entergy Nuclear's Palisades atomic reactor is located on the Lake Michigan shore in Covert, MI.Rosa Lin at Nuclear Intelligence Weekly (NIW) has written an article entitled "United States: The Palisades Embrittlement Battle" (reproduced here with permission from the publisher), about dueling appeals submitted to the full U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Environmental intervenors, including Beyond Nuclear, have appealed an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel's (ASLBP) rejection, on May 8th, of its contention against an Entergy Nuclear License Amendment Request (LAR) for regulatory relief regarding brittle fracture risk in Palisades' reactor pressure vessel (RPV) at colder temperatures. Entergy has just appealed the same ASLBP's granting of an evidentiary hearing, on June 18th, to the intervenors regarding an Entergy LAR for RPV ductile fracture risk at hotter temperatures.

NRC has recognized, on numerous occassions, that Palisades has the worst neutron radiation embrittled RPV in the U.S., but numerous other pressurized water reactors (including Point Beach, WI; Indian Point 3, NY; Diablo Canyon 1, CA; Beaver Valley 1, PA; and Davis-Besse, OH) are not far behind. Embrittled RPVs are at risk of pressurized thermal shock through-wall fracture, which would lead to core meltdown.

Lin quotes Beyond Nuclear, as well as Dave Lochbaum, Director of the Nuclear Safety Project at UCS:

Palisades "would not be allowed to operate if the standards applied to Yankee Rowe were applied" to it, said Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to a plant shut down in 1992 due to embrittlement.

Sign petition demanding TEPCO stop dumping radioactivity into the Pacific Ocean!

Our friends at Green Action Japan have asked us to urge our supporters to consider signing a Change.Org petition demanding that the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company cease and desist from discharging hazardous radioactivity from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. For updates on the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, and to learn more about the Japanese environmental movement's struggle to block atomic reactor restarts, be sure to visit Beyond Nuclear's Japan website section!

Activists climb Kilimanjaro to end uranium mining and nuclear weapons

"Palisades 50," by Dave Lochbaum, UCS

Entergy Nuclear's Palisades atomic reactor, on the Lake Michigan shore in Covert, MIDave Lochbaum, Director of the Nuclear Safety Project at Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), has penned another of his "Fisson Stories," entitled "Palisades 50," yet another installment in his watchdogging of Entergy Nuclear's problem-plagued atomic reactor.

Remarkably, during U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission CDBI (Component Design Bases Inspections) in 2014, 10 violations were discovered at Palisades, out of 20 components (with "vitally imporant safety functions") inspected. This was nearly three times the national average.

Lochbaum concluded: "The testing and inspection programs are supposed to demonstrate that the public is adequately protected.

That’s not happening.

That must get fixed before impaired safety components contribute to the next nuclear disaster."

Sierra Club says "stop making radioactive waste"!

Environmental coalition members from the Crabshell Alliance, Sierra Club Nuclear-Free Campaign, NIRS, PSR, NEIS, and Public Citizen "just say NO!" at the NRC HQ nuke waste con game GEIS public comment meeting on 11/14/13 in Rockville, MD. Photo credit David Martin and Erica Grey.Wallace L. Taylor, an attorney based in Cedar Rapids, IA, has filed a Friend of the Court brief on behalf of the Sierra Club, in support of environmental petitioners in the New York v. NRC II federal court case.

The nation's largest grassroots environmental organization, with over 600,000 members, the Sierra Club has a very active, and growing, Nuclear-Free Campaign nationwide.

For high-level radioactive wastes that already exist, Taylor called for Hardened On-Site Storage -- a position shared by hundreds of environmental groups, representing all 50 states.

Taylor stated "one way to address the environmental impacts of the continued storage of radioactive waste is to stop making radioactive waste."

He called for present and future electricity needs to be met not by nuclear power nor fossil fuels, but rather efficiency and renewables. He cited numerous technical studies, including Dr. Arjun Makhijani of IEER's 2007 book Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, that show this alternative is quite reasonable. More.