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 public comment meeting on 11/14/13 in Rockville, MD. Photo credit David Martin and Erica GreyPlease attend if you can, and spread the word about, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) so-called "CONSENT-BASED SITING PUBLIC MEETING," to be held at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center at 450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive, Chicago, IL 60611, on Tuesday, March 29, 2016 from 1pm to 5:30pm Central time.
[A series of additional meetings are scheduled to be held around the country, between April and July; the DOE's so-called "Kick-Off" meeting took place in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 20, 2016 -- see the notes Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps took, in order to get an idea of what's likely to come in Chicago next Tuesday, and at the other meetings elsewhere in the months ahead.]
DOE states: Registration is encouraged in order to assist our logistics planning. To register, please visit the Chicago Registration Page. Those unable to attend can view the meeting online through a live webcast that can be accessed through the registration page or the direct link Chicago Webcast.
What is it DOE wants to site? Irradiated nuclear fuel/high-level radioactive waste parking lot dumps, as well as permanent burial dumps.
The U. of Chicago is a very appropriate location for such a meeting. After all, Enrico Fermi, during the Manhattan Project race for the atomic bomb -- later dropped, in August 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan -- fired up the first atomic reactor in the world, and created the first high-level radioactive waste, at the University of Chicago, on December 2, 1942. As the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), Beyond Nuclear, Friends of the Earth, et al. conference "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High," held at the U. of Chicago on December 2, 2012, emphasized, "we need to stop making it," because "we don't even know what to do with the first cupful" of high-level radioactive waste Fermi generated 73 years ago now!
(See NEIS's web archive of that entire "Mountain of Waste" conference.)
To the contrary, DOE's twisted "mission," just like the motivation of President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC), as clearly revealed in its Jan. 2012 Final Report, is to "solve" the "minor problem" of radioactive waste, so that nuclear power can be expanded -- which would inevitably generate yet more forever deadly radioactive waste!
The vast majority of Chicago's electricity comes from nuclear power (75-80% -- as bad or worse than the situation in "Nuclear France"!). Warrenville, in DuPage County, IL, just outside Chicago, is Exelon's headquarters. Exelon is the largest nuclear power utility in the U.S. (and now, with the Washington, D.C. Public Service Commission's controversial approval of Exelon's takeover of the Mid-Atlantic utility Pepco, the largest electric utility in the country). Illinois is already "home" to more commercial high-level radioactive waste than any other state, due to more reactors -- 14, with 11 still operating -- than any other state.
The good news about this Chicago meeting? David Kraft of Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), as well as Kim Wasserman-Nieto from Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, will present on a plenary panel.
The bad news about this "public comment period" meeting? DOE has -- insultingly -- allotted a mere 30-minutes for public comments at the end of the day! (At the Jan. 20 meeting in Washington, D.C., DOE did not allow any oral public comments whatsoever!)
However, as the DOE's December 23, 2015 "Nuclear Grinch Who Stole Xmas" Federal Register Notice stated:
You may submit questions or comments by any of the following methods:
Email: Responses may be provided by email to consentbasedsiting@hq.doe.gov. Please include “Response to IPC” [Invitation for Public Comment] in the subject line.
Mail: Responses may be provided by mail to the following address: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Response to IPC, 1000 Independence Ave SW., Washington, DC 20585.
Fax: Responses may be faxed to 202-586-0544. Please include “Response to IPC” on the fax cover page.
Online: Responses will be accepted online at www.regulations.gov. [DOE has here only provided the general website -- <Consent-Based Siting> must be entered in the search field to get to the precise site]
We must flood DOE with a large number of public comments between now and the end of the public comment period. DOE has just extended the public comment period to July 31, 2016, due to a recently announced meeting to be held in late July in Minneapolis, Minnesota (although DOE has yet to announce the exact date and location for the later meetings).
Please read on for additional information, including a summary of contextual background information, and further below, links to recent Beyond Nuclear website posts that provide yet more detailed background information.
BACKGROUND INFO.
The DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, whose "mission" is to promote nuclear power, is sniffing around the countryside for the path of least resistance, to construct and operate its long-coveted irradiated nuclear fuel parking lot dumps (de facto permanent, so-called "interim" centralized or consolidated surface storage sites), as well as one or more permanent so-called Deep Geologic Repositories (DGRs), A.K.A. permanent high-level radioactive waste burial dumps.
A number of the DOE leadership team pushing "Consent-Based Siting," and "enacting" the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC) Jan. 2012 Final Report recommendations, were, in fact, also staff on the BRC itself. No one personifies this self-serving, revolving-door relationship better than the Energy Secretary himself: Ernest Moniz was a BRC member, and now heads the agency pushing "Consent-Based Siting," deep borehole disposal, etc.
Ironically enough, though, the BRC recommended that a new entity be created to manage high-level radioactive waste in the U.S., as the DOE, through incompetence and worse, over years and decades, has earned the deep distrust of the American people. Despite this recommendation, DOE's pro-nuclear power Office of Nuclear Energy is still pushing the agenda, including this "Consent-Based Siting" proceeding. This is completely unacceptable, and calls the legitimacy of this entire "Consent-Based Siting" proceeding into question.
Tranpsort Risks
The opening of parking lot dumps (as early as 2021, according to DOE's schedule), or permanent burial dumps (by 2048, DOE estimates), would launch unprecedented numbers of risky high-level waste radioactive shipments -- potential Mobile Chernobyls, Floating Fukushimas, and Dirty Bombs on Wheels -- onto the roads, rails (including through downtown Chicago, and through many other major population centers), and/or waterways (including the Great Lakes, other lakes, rivers, and sea coasts), through most states.
Invoking the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, DOE has no intention whatsoever to seek any form of consent from countless transportation corridor communities.
(NIRS has a website sub-section entitled "Stop Fukushima Freeways," with more information about high-level radioactive waste transportation risks.)
DOE's Orwellian Notions of "Consent"
Regarding "consent" for siting parking lot dumps or permanent burial dumps, there are huge questions about how INFORMED the consent will be, as DOE -- yet again -- downplays and peddles deceptions about the risks involved.
And as DOE works to "define consent" (to the advantage of the nuclear industry, which it serves, and to the disadvantage of the at-risk public), we must beware of the open secret -- "consent" likely means "incentives," as U.S. Republican Senators (like James Risch of Idaho) cynically joked at summer 2013 Energy and Natural Resource Committee hearings to consider authorizing centralized interim storage sites. Such "incentives" could also be called bribes. Shamefully, low income Native American reservations will be targeted for parking lot dumps, as they so often have been in the past -- an environmental injustice, and radioactive racism. The tiny Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation was thus targeted, from 1996 to 2012, but thankfully, the dump was ultimately stopped.
Other parking lot dump targets include communities already "hosting" nuclear power plants, and their on-site high-level radioactive wastes. One such target is Exelon's Dresden nuclear power plant in Morris, IL. Dresden has three reactors (one long closed, two still operating), their storage pools, their dry cask storage, as well as the adjacent General Electric-Morris "Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation" -- an abandoned reprocessing facility that thankfully never operated. Thus, Dresden and the adjacent GE-Morris pool, already "host" a vast amount of irradiated nuclear fuel -- around 3,000 metric tons!
Additional targets for parking lot dumps include communities "hosting" DOE nuclear weapons complex sites already heavily-burdened by radioactive waste and radioactive contamination (such as Savannah River Site, South Carolina).
The lead targets for parking lot dumps at the present time, however, appear to be not far from one another, in Texas and New Mexico. This includes Waste Control Specialists (WCS), LLC, in Andrews County, Texas, adjacent to or even above the Ogallala Aquifer, which is poised to apply for a parking lot dump construction and operation license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as early as April 2016. And this also includes the DOE's own Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, New Mexico; it is being targeted by Eddy-Lea County nuke dump boosters to expand WIPP's "mission" -- despite the supposedly "impossible" radioactive leak that then actually did take place, in Feb. 2014, that has kept it shut down. WIPP is being targeted to include not only plutonium-contaminated nuclear weapons complex waste burial, but now a commercial high-level radioactive waste surface parking lot dump as well.
"Interim" parking lot dump "host" communities should beware of the risk for "temporary surface storage" to turn into permanent underground disposal. As Beyond Nuclear warned in 2013, when related legislation was first introduced on Capitol Hill: "preference" for "co-location" of pilot "priority" and "emergency" centralized interim storage by 2021, "nonpriority" [that is, full-scale] centralized interim storage by 2025, and even the permanent dumpsite by 2048, makes this risk of a single nuclear sacrifice area for the entire country all the more likely.
RECENT WEB POSTS
Department of Energy Consent-based Siting Public Meeting in Chicago on March 29, 2016
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/radioactive-waste-whatsnew/2016/3/18/department-of-energy-consent-based-siting-public-meeting-in.html [March 18, 2016 Beyond Nuclear web site post; simply re-posts a message emailed by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy to environmental watchdogs on March 18, 2016. See the Chicago flier that was attached to the email. Also see the Chicago agenda that was attached to the email.]
NIRS: What would it take for YOU to CONSENT to Nuclear Waste? DOE wants to know
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/radioactive-waste-whatsnew/2016/3/17/nirs-what-would-it-take-for-you-to-consent-to-nuclear-waste.html [March 17, 2016 Beyond Nuclear web site post; a re-post of a message/alert distributed by our friends and colleagues at NIRS, put out on March 10, 2016.]
Save the Date: DOE announces "Consent-Based Siting" public comment mtgs. in Chicago (March) & Atlanta (April)
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/radioactive-waste-whatsnew/2016/1/21/save-the-date-doe-announces-consent-based-siting-public-comm.html [January 21, 2016 Beyond Nuclear web site post, immediately following DOE's Washington, D.C. "Kick-Off" meeting for its "Consent-Based Siting" public comment proceeding.
Incredibly enough, the Jan. 20 DC meeting included NO oral public comment opportunity! Supposedly, future public meetings WILL include an oral public comment opportunity -- that is the whole point!
But Chicago's on March 29th is a mere 30 minutes allotted for public comments -- that's only six public comment slots, at the standard five minutes per comment; or, one minute per comment, for 30 commenters, in which time it's difficult to say anything meaningful.
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