Back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill make clear: the Yucca dump and Mobile Chernobyl "ain't dead yet!"

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is dead. By Jim Day, Las Vegas Review-Journal - 2/1/2010 (be sure to count the toes!)

Take Action!

Urge your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to block S. 1240, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, and instead to require Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) for high-level radioactive wastes at atomic reactors.

Also, contact U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and urge that he oppose S. 1240, since "consent-based" principles for siting "consolidated interim storage" sites and permanent geologic disposal repositories have been gutted.

You can be patched through to Members of Congress via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

Take advantage of your U.S. Senators and Representative being back home for the annual August congressional recess. Get together with your friends, neighbors, and organizations in your area. Contact your Congress Members' schedulers in Washington, D.C. to request a face-to-face meeting with them, to discuss your concerns with S. 1240! If that is not possible, follow up with a request for a face-to-face meeting with their district staff.

Background and Updates

To borrow a phrase from Monty Python's "Holy Grail," the radioactive mutant zombie (see political cartoon, left, and be sure to count the toes!) that is the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada high-level radioactive waste dump "ain't dead yet!" But hopefully, it ain't "feeling better," either!

On July 30th, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Ron Wyden (D-OR), held a hearing on S. 1240, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013. Witnesses included Dave Lochbaum of UCS, and Geoff Fettus of NRDC. The video archive of the entire hearing is posted at the ENR website, as are the written submissions of all the witnesses, and the opening statements of the ENR Chairman, Ranking Member, etc.

Lochbaum urged that the legislation address the decades-neglected safety risks of densely-packed high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pools. He pointed out that "thinning out" HLRW storage pools could prevent a catastrophic radioactive waste fire, outside containment, resulting in: a collective population dose of 350,000 person-rems of exposure to hazardous radioactivity; 9,400 square miles of radioactively contaminated, interdicted land; and 4.1 million long-term displaced individuals (however, even a "low-density" HLRW storage pool fire could still result in: 27,000 person-rems of exposure; 170 square miles of interdicted land; and 81,000 long-term displaced individuals).

Fettus expressed strong opposition to the severing of linkage between "centralized" or "consolidated interim storage" and permanent disposal, raising the specter of default, de facto permanent surface storage for HLRW.

Both UCS and NRDC, along with 200 national, regional, and local grassroots environmental and public interest groups across the country, have long endorsed Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). Despite this obvious, common sense first step for upgrading safety, security, health, and environmental protections, the call for HOSS has fallen on deaf ears for over a decade, at both the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

A hopeful moment in the Senate ENR hearing came when witness Marvin Fertel, head of the industry lobbying arm Nuclear Energy Institute, insisted that HLRW storage pools, even at Fukushima Daiichi, are safe, sound, and secure. ENR Chairman Wyden -- who traveled to Fukushima Daiichi in spring, 2012, donned a radiation protection suit, and inspected the blasted site -- strongly disagreed with him. In fact, Wyden has called for the full resources of the U.S. government and military to assist at Fukushima Daiichi to remove the HLRW from the Unit #4 storage pool before the building collapses, and the HLRW ignites into a catastrophic radioactive inferno.

Republican committee members, such as Jim Risch of Idaho and John Barrasso of Wyoming, pressed Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on why the proposed Yucca Mountain dumpsite in Nevada has been abandoned by the Obama administration.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit has ruled in favor of the States of South Carolina and Washington, ordering NRC to resume its indefinitely-suspended Yucca dump licensing proceeding. However, the Obama administration has not requested funding from Congress in three years to support the Yucca Mountain Project, so there are next to no resources left to conduct the proceeding, neither at NRC nor DOE.

The Republican clamor for the Yucca dump was even more shrill at the July 31st U.S. House Environment and the Economy Subcommittee hearing chaired by John Shimkus (R-IL). The "Congressman from Exelon" has multiple atomic reactors in, and adjacent to, the area of his congressional district. As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Shimkus floated the offer to Nevada of the $5.6 billion estimated to be needed to be spent in order to carry out the aims of S. 1240 in the next decade alone, in order to "lure" the Silver State into reconsidering its tireless, adamant opposition to the Yucca dump.

As reported in the LVRJ article: 'In response to Shimkus, Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said after the hearing that Nevada “is not for sale.”

“Would $5.6 billion be a ‘good lure’ for Collinsville, Illinois?” Titus said, referring to Shimkus’ hometown. “We could ship the waste there, maybe by barge on the Mississippi?”'

As reported by the National Journal: 'Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., broke from his Democratic colleagues, questioning the cost of finding alternatives. He asked Moniz if Yucca Mountain was no longer an option given his support for the new approach. "The issue's not dead," Moniz responded. Dingell pressed further, asking if the Yucca site was still "viable." Moniz responded: "It needs both science and public acceptance, the latter is not there." Dingell and Upton [R-MI] penned a joint op-ed earlier this month calling for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reach a final decision on Yucca Mountain.' (emphasis added)

Ironically enough, NRC's Chairwoman, Allison Macfarlane, a Ph.D. geologist, literally wrote the book on the Yucca dump's scientific unsuitability! Macfarlane was also a member of the BRC.

Why President Obama, former Energy Secretary Chu, and current Energy Secretary Moniz, will not address the scientific unsuitability of the Yucca dump proposal is not clear.

Dingell, the longest-serving Member of Congress in U.S. history, is the "Congressman from Detroit Edison": his district in southeast MI "hosts" the biggest General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor in the entire world, on the Lake Erie shoreline. Fermi Unit 2 is nearly as big as Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 and 2 put together. Dingell, who entered the U.S. House in 1955, was serving when the Fermi Unit 1 experimental plutonium breeder reactor suffered a partial meltdown on October 5, 1966. Despite this near-miss with disaster, documented in John G. Fuller's 1975 classic We Almost Lost Detroit, Dingell has remained loyal to the nuclear industry's agenda, including his advocacy for the Yucca dump.

Fred Upton, Republican Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the "Congressman from Entergy and American Electric Power," with three atomic reactors in his southwest MI congressional district, at the Palisades and Cook nuclear power plants on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The importance of "public acceptance" was an apt observation by Moniz, who also "served" on President Obama's and Energy Secretary Chu's so-called "Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future" (BRC) from 2010-2012. Although the BRC's final report, and the "Gang of 4's" (Wyden, plus ENR Ranking Republican Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, as well as Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Ranking Republican Lamar Alexander (R-TN)) S. 1240, trumpet a "consent-based" approach to opening "consolidated interim storage" sites (beginning in 2021) and permanent disposal geologic repositories (by 2048), public comments, concerns, and criticisms have been largely to entirely ignored.

Despite countless calls for HOSS at numerous BRC public hearings, Moniz et al. refused to call for it, ironically expressing confidence in the safety of HLRW storage pools, even in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. In fact, the BRC and its staff reportedly did not even read the many thousands of written submissions the panel encouraged concerned citizens and environmental organizations to submit!

Tragically, the U.S. Senate ENR Committee has followed BRC's bad faith example. The ENR Committee called on citizens and organizations to submit comments on its "Discussion Draft" of S. 1240. Beyond Nuclear, along with 2,500 individuals and more than 100 groups, answered ENR's call, in good faith. The ENR Committee not only refused to take the comments seriously, but the final draft of S. 1240 was even worse than the "Discussion Draft."

For example, the linkage between interim storage and permanent disposal has been made even weaker, if it has not been broken altogether. Also, the bill, if enacted, would allow for "consolidated interim storage" sites to be studied and even found suitable, without the consent of the targeted locality, Native American reservation, and/or state! Although "consent" would supposedly still be required before the parking lot dump could actually be constructed and operated, the momentum in that direction would be huge. Any resistance could be all the more easily smothered by the "prize": "incentives," "economic development," "jobs," or other inducements -- in other words, payoffs, buy outs, or legalized bribery. Such "sweeteners" for "hosting" vast amounts of some of the most deadly substances ever created by humankind, forever deadly HLRWs, are likely to be targeted at politically or economically vulnerable communities, such as Native American reservations, already heavily radiologically-burdened DOE sites (WIPP, NM; SRS, SC; INL, ID), or commercial nuclear power plants (such as Dresden, IL).

It appears that, in the "Gentlemen's Club" of the U.S. Senate, the suggestions of nuclear industry lobbyists carry a bit more weight than those of environmentalists and public interest groups. But why wouldn't they, given it's the "best Congress money can buy"? (Judy Pasternak at the American University Investigative Reporting Workshop documented that between 1999 and 2009, the nuclear power industry spent $645 million on federal lobbying, and another $65 million on federal campaign contributions. That adds up to way more than a million dollars per week, for a decade! If anything, the rate of such legalized bribery has likely increased in the past four years.)

As with the BRC, the "Gang of 4's" S. 1240 has put parking lot dumps -- and the Mobile Chernobyls they would launch -- on the fast track. A "pilot" consolidated interim storage site is foreseen by 2021, to house "stranded" or "orphaned" HLRWs at permanently shutdown, and sometimes entirely dismantled, atomic reactors. The supposed justification is so that those sites can be "released" for "un-restricted re-use," ignoring the fact that these sites are still significantly radioactively contaminated, even after the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in decommissioning "clean-up" costs. The Big Rock Point nuclear power plant in northern MI is just such a case in point. This supposed justification for rushing removal of "stranded" HLRWs also rings completely hollow, as the "host" communities, who know better than anyone how dangerous the wastes are, have clearly stated "not in our name."

Communities nationwide had better express their "non-consent," and their lack of "public acceptance," had better "speak now, or forever hold their peace," or else their communities, states, or regions could soon find themselves targeted for "hosting" parking lot dumps and/or permanent burial sites, or "serving" as crossroads for HLRW through-shipments by road, rail, or waterway. S. 1240 must be blocked, and replaced by HOSS!