nuclear-news

Get Rid of It! But Where? How? When? And Who’s Gonna Pay for It? The Nuclear Waste Dilemma  CounterPunch by ACE HOFFMAN DECEMBER 19, 2013 Hearings on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s proposed Generic Environment Impact Statement (GEIS) for nuclear waste were held nationally over the past few months and attended by more than 1400 people.  The comment period (for written comments) for “NRC NUREG-2157″ ends December 20th.

In California, about 150 people attended a hearing in Carlsbad, and over 200 attended the San Luis Obispo meeting. Tonight in San Clemente, citizens will ask their city council to request an extension of the comment period.  Concerned citizens hope to be able to get additional requests from other local communities, to force the federal government to remove nuclear waste from the now-closed San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station, or at least, to give us hardened on-site storage, which neither the current dry casks nor the spent fuel pools provide.

“Hardened” might mean underground, behind earthen berms, separated from each other,  moved away from rail, ship, aerial and truck bomb access points, fewer assemblies in each cask, etc. etc..  These are standard anti-terrorism procedures which are NOT being done at our ISFSIs (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations, the current acronym for “semi-permanent nuclear waste dump and blight on the land.”)

Yesterday Donna Gilmore and I were suddenly interviewed by Fox 5 San Diego about Southern California Edison’s shipment of Unit II’s original reactor pressure vessel head to Clive, Utah.  It’s a dome-shaped object approximately 14 feet across.  Edison says it weighs 77 tons, and says that standing six feet away from it for an hour will give you about as much radiation as watching television for about a year.  Do they mean modern OLED screens or old tube TVs?  Do they mean the most modern types of dental x-ray equipment when they say it’s equal to a dental x-ray, or do they mean older machines that give out nearly an order of magnitude more radiation?  Or even older ones that were even worse?

Here’s a link to the report based on the on-site interview with Donna Gilmore…… http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/19/the-nuclear-waste-dilemma/