Addressing Pennsylvania’s Atomic Reactor and Radioactive Waste Risks as the Three Mile Island Unit 2 Meltdown 40th Anniversary Approaches
Eric Epstein, Chairman of TMIA, introduces Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps and Paul GunterBeyond Nuclear's Reactor Oversight Project Director, Paul Gunter, and Radioactive Waste Specialist, Kevin Kamps, were honored and privileged to join with colleagues from Three Mile Island Alert (TMIA) -- Chairman Eric Epstein, and Security Consultant Scott Portzline -- for a press conference in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg on Oct. 2, 2018. Maureen Mulligan also helped organize the event.
As posted on TMIA's web site:
See the press advisory, here.
See a recording of the 41-minute long press conference, here.
See a 2.5 minute video entitled "Radioactive Waste Transport Risks in Pennsylvania," showing transport road and rail routes for irradiated nuclear fuel shipments by heavy-haul truck and train, from the Peach Bottom and Three Mile Island nuclear power plants. The video was captured by drone, and shows an aerial perspective on the shipment routes. (As shown in the aerial imagery, and as documented in the 2008 U.S. Department of Energy Yucca Mountain, Nevada High-Level Radioactive Waste Repository Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement map in Appendix G, Figure G-36, Page G-128, as compared to a GIS rail and road network, the heavy-haul truck road route from Peach Bottom is on State Route 74, from Lower Chanceford, to Red Lion, to Dallastown, to York, where the irradiated nuclear fuel shipping containers would be loaded onto the Norfolk Southern railway; in the case of TMI, the irradiated nuclear fuel would use the Norfolk Southern railroad. A special thank you to Dr. Fred Dilger for documenting and confirming all of this in his 2017 documents, posted at the very top of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Project's web site.)
Watch "Eye-Witness to Rule-Breaking," a 2-minute video prepared by Scott Portzline, documenting both low-level and high-level radioactive waste transport incidents he observed with his own eyes, in and around his home in Harrisburg, PA.
Watch a 1-mintue animation entitled "Nuclear Waste Transport," also prepared by Portzline.
The Beyond Nuclear & TMIA press packets included: both state (see page 34 of 45) road and rail route maps, as well as close up maps of the Philadelphia (page 15 of 20) and Pittsburgh (page 16 of 20) area routes; the shipment numbers for PA (2,036 rail-sized casks, by heavy-haul truck and train, 657 truck-sized casks, by semi down roadways and interstate highways; see page 5 of 20), as well as a listing of the U.S. congressional districts -- every one in the state, except for the 8th district -- directly crossed by road and/or rail routes (pages 16-17 of 20); a Public Citizen fact sheet entitled "Everyone Knows That Accidents Happen: Nuclear Waste Transport Casks"; and a Beyond Nuclear newsletter on the TMI meltdown's 35th annual commemoration in 2014.
(Also see the TMI Truth section of Beyond Nuclear's web site, for more information; and this link has more info. about the mega-risks of high-level radioactive waste wet storage pool fires, with a case study at Peach Bottom.)
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Media coverage:
(2.) The PLS (Pennsylvania Legislative Services) "Eye Opener" --
Anti-nuclear activists raise waste concerns as atomic power works way back into political spotlight
“We still have five nuclear power plants, nine reactors and no nuclear toilet,” longtime activist Eric Epstein said.
The conversation comes as federal politicians try to restart a national conversation on where to put America’s nuclear waste, and state nuclear allies prepare to make the case that without aid, the industry could go bust in Pennsylvania.
Epstein, with national anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear, showed drone videos and maps of proposed paths by road and rail for nuclear waste from both in and out of state, passing local landmarks and through densely populated areas.
Since the Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed in 1982, utility ratepayers have built up a $40 billion federal fund for pay to for spent fuel rod removal.
The US Government Accountability Office estimates that 90,000 metric tons of radioactive material need disposal, including 80,000 from the commercial electricity generation industry.
The ‘80s act designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a destination for waste shipments, but local concerns, especially from Native American tribes, have delayed the project, while former President Barack Obama terminated the project durimg his tenure.
If shipments started towards a western waste dump, Pennsylvania could see 2,693 casks of radioactive material move through the state, per federal estimates collected by the Nevada state government.
Kevin Kamps, who handles waste concerns for Beyond Nuclear, pointed to radiation coming off of traveling casks, how well casks could handle a high speed collision, and risks of terrorist attack to cast aspersions on their safety.
“These containers are not ready for real world action,” Kamps said.
But Rod McCullum, a senior director of fuel and decommissioning for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group, pointed to the years of cask transportation in other nuclear countries, such as France, that have gone on without incident.
“I think we’re one of the safest hazardous cargoes on the road,” he said.
McCullum also referenced ‘70s tests that included rocket powered trains hitting waste shipping containers to no effect. However, Kamps pointed to a US military test where a similarly vintage missile managed to penetrate a cask.
Epstein and the other activists said their preferred solution was to keep waste on site in reinforced, low profile buildings, and not in the pools used by many reactors, including Three Mile Island.
But leaving waste on site has led to costly lawsuits from electric producers, who have, according to Utility Dive, won over $6 billion from the federal government. McCollum added that on site storage would have its own monitoring expenses, diffused among multiple locations that couldn’t be reused.
In an email, Maria Hudson, a spokesperson for TMI operator Exelon, said “there is ample space in the station’s spent fuel pool to store all the fuel in the reactor,” and added further details on the plant’s deactivation, unless forestalled by the state, would be available at a later date.
Some lawmakers are still looking for solutions. Rep. Tom Mehaffie (R-Dauphin), a member of the General Assembly’s Nuclear Caucus, said his main concern was keeping the local plant’s hundreds of jobs filled.
“We can talk about where spent fuel rods go, but that’s not the concern right now,” he said.
But Epstein said the concern wouldn’t go away any time soon.
“We still have thousands of tons of radioactive waste that need to be disposed of. It can't say here indefinitely,” he said. “That’s a funeral where a pallbearer needs to stand in place for thousands of years.”
Stephen Caruso is the Harrisburg bureau chief at The PLS Reporter. Have a question, comment or tip? Email him at stephen@mypls.com.
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