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8,ooo petitioners call for closure of USA’s Fukushima style nuclear plants

Petitioners Fight for Suspension of Fukushima-Style Nuclear Plants, Barnegat Ocean Acres Patch  Oyster Creek Generating Station is among the 21 reactors that more than 8,000 petitioners are asking the NRC to shutdown By Elaine Piniat, 7 Oct 11,  Petitioners urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to immediately suspend all U.S. nuclear plants with the same type of reactor as the plant in Fukushima, Japan during a public hearing today.

“This appeal is for human sensibility, moral responsibility and due process,” said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Oversight Project for Beyond Nuclear. “Fukushima tragically demonstrates that the Mark 1 containment liability is a deceptive falsehood, a breach of contract to both the NRC and public health and safety.”

The public hearing was prompted by a petition of more than 8,000, including the local group Grandmothers, Mothers and More for Energy Safety (GRAMMES), calling on the NRC to “freeze our Fukushimas.”

The petition, headed by Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear organization, calls for the immediate suspension of 17 nuclear facilities with General Electric (GE) Boiling Water Reactors Mark 1 units, the same type of reactors at Fukushima that experienced a meltdown following an earthquake and tsunami….

At Oyster Creek, the oldest operating U.S. Atomic Reactor, over 700 tons of high-level radioactive waste has been generated, Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear said.

“Granted that some of that has been moved into dry cast storage but the pool remains full to its capacity. And this was a re-rack capacity. Much later in terms of quantity of high level radioactive waste than it was originally designed for,” he said.

This represents 125 million curies of radioactive caesium-137 and the NRC has reported at various points in time that up to 100 percent of this hazardous material could be released from a pool fire, Kamps said.

“I would like to point out that Fukushima Daiichi units one, two, three and four combined in terms of the inventory of high level radioactive waste in their storage pools does not match some of these reactors I mentioned in terms of how much waste is in these pools,” Kamps said. “So the risks are greater here for boil downs and the consequences of a radioactive fire in these pools.”…..

“You can only imagine how people who live around Mark 1 reactors feel about their vulnerability at this moment and feel about the NRC’s view in this to deal with this issue in a timely manner,” said Deb Katz of Citizens Awareness Network. “There is now a slow motion catastrophe ongoing in Japan with three reactors like our own that will scar that country and the world forever…Move the fuel out of the fuel pools and shutter these reactors because it is unconscionable that you allow the nuclear industry to put us at such a risk.”

Ninety-five percent of the people in the world know about Fukushima, Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service said….

The public hearing was used as a session to listen to the concerns of the petitioners. No action was taken. A representative from the NRC was not immediately available to comment on the next step…

October 8, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, USA