Plan to bring Germany’s radioactive trash to South Carolina

German nuclear waste could be shipped to Savannah River Site http://chronicle.augusta.com/latest-news/2014-04-30/german-nuclear-waste-could-be-shipped-savannah-river-site By Meg Mirshak

Staff Writer Wednesday, April 30, 2014 The federal government has entered into an agreement with Germany to evaluate the possibility of accepting shipments of German highly-radioactive nuclear waste at Savannah River Site.

The U.S. Department of Energy signed a “statement of intent” with German research agencies offering to evaluate accepting, processing and disposing of waste at SRS. No final decision has been made, according to SRS spokesman Jim Giusti.

“All potential work to support DOE’s evaluation would be funded by the German government so the Statement of Intent is an important step forward,” Giusti said in an email this week to SRS stakeholders.

Additional shipments of waste at SRS has drawn opposition from environmentalist Tom Clements, director of watchdog group SRS Watch. SRS already has its own challenges disposing of large amounts of high-level waste existing at the facility, he said.

“The proposal to import highly radioactive spent fuel from Germany to SRS is simply nuclear dumping dressed up as nuclear non-proliferation,” Clements said. “Germany’s challenging dilemma with what to do with its nuclear waste must not become a waste management problem for the Savannah River Site.”

The graphite-based fuel for the German reactor contains U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium. Returning it to the U.S. would remove it from potential use in a nuclear weapon, Giusti said.

The energy department will “prepare appropriate analysis and consult with the public” as part of the National Environmental Policy Act before any decisions on accepting the waste are made, Giusti said.

May 2, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes

6 Comments »

Dear Christina,

Is there some way you and I could work together to end sixty-nine years (2014 – 1945 = 69 yrs) of government deception on the basic nature of nuclear forces ?

Until that is done, humans cannot safely harvest *”**powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction”* that Aston reported in the last paragraph of his 1922 Nobel Prize Lecture

See https://nuclear-news.net/2014/04/29/a-2-billion-stop-gap-measure-chernobyls-new-tomb/#comment-240545

With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel 1-573-647-1377

On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 10:55 PM, nuclear-news

Comment by omanuel | May 2, 2014 | Reply
With all due respect to the good you do, I hope you will consider not using this picture anymore. I remain perplexed as to why you wish to insult people who are on your side with this cartoon. Tom Clements has been fighting against nuclear everything for 25 years: http://www.srswatch.org The Nonukesyall web site which you were promoting is in this area, fighting both against the new Vogtle Plants in Georgia and against a MOX facility across the river in South Carolina. Generally those against dumps are against nuclear power and vice versa. I also fail to understand why you think that the US should take Germany’s waste, as implied by your cartoon? Germany’s dumped its radioactive sludge on the farmlands of Italy; burned its waste in Tennessee; and now wants to dump on the poor in South Carolina. How is this just? Let them take responsibility for their waste for a change! It is Germany which started the nuclear age, anyway. Einstein was German, albeit trained across the border in Switzerland. The US feared the Nazis had the bomb, is what got them into the atomic age – in fact, wasn’t it Einstein who encouraged them? The US took many German scientists after the war. American citizens fought very hard against nuclear and so no new nuclear had been permitted since the Cold War in the US, until very recently. Mr. Clements is one of these who worked so hard. Americans were never asked if they wanted nuclear energy, it was and is being forced upon them. South Carolina is very wet, hot, and subject to earthquakes, making it unsuitable for nuclear anything. At least the US gov did mothball the MOX facility there. This German waste will surely be dumped upon a very poor black community. Ultimately any problems which happen in South Carolina will impact Europe more than other US states. In the US, the blacks and indigenous peoples appear to take the brunt of uranium mining, nuclear power plants and apparently they will for the waste too (right now the US waste is at the power plants; WIPP is for government waste). This waste was uranium mined from American Indian lands, the energy used by Germans, and then the waste is to be dumped on South Carolina blacks? Sounds like Hitler lives, to me. If you want to go after someone on this, go after Senator Mary Landrieu who is taking money from those building the plants with one hand and appears doling out the money for Vogtle with the other. Also, Obama, and the head of the US Dept. of Energy – Moniz. Please stop dissing your fellow activists with this cartoon! Please! The head of the DOE’s parents are from the Azores islands and arrived recently in Massachusetts – far away from South Carolina or Tennessee or Mississippi or New Mexico, whereas the people he wants to dump on have been there since the 1700s and even before. How is that just? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Moniz He’s also not elected but appointed. There’s also environmental suitability. While South Carolina is not pristine, Mississippi still is and would be akin to dumping in the rainforest or worse. Just because Mississippi has an idiotic governor asking for a dump doesn’t mean that a green state which has mostly been spared fracking and is an agriculture-forestry state should have its environment ruined. It is also prone to hurricanes and tornados and has unsuitable geology, a hot and wet climate, and a very poor and poorly educated population. Protecting the environment is above and beyond the govt. officials, and especially for colonial settler states like the US (and Australia) where land was taken for the indigenous peoples.

Comment by miningawareness | May 2, 2014 | Reply
- hi mining awareness thanks for the clarification of the dumping issue. i think the cartoon by christina is a tongue in cheek comment on the overall situation concerning waste and peoples general sound bite attitudes to this problem.. I think your excellent comment should stand to clarify the exact situation and keep us all on track.. i personally like the effort christina uts into her art and i hope you enjoy her humour as much as i do concerning her many other posts.. keep up the great work and thanks for your input, which is excellent always.. crowd sourced art critiques is allowed here on nuclear-news.net 🙂 especially when it encourages such great points … peace
  
  Comment by arclight2011part2 | May 2, 2014 | Reply
  - Thanks and thanks for the feedback. I guess it’s all in the caps for FINE and perhaps knowing Sesame Street, which I never cared for, perhaps for this reason. Since some of those characters were grumpy, or I think this was Oscar the grouch, then saying something positive like Stop making it and stop dumping it, wouldn’t fit – like making Eeyore be an optimist. It’s not my idea of humour. But, I don’t have to like it, it’s not my blog. I think most people don’t see the reactors, whatever the country, and so don’t really know they are there.
    
    Do you see reactors in Paris? No, but in the countryside you do. Do you see reactors in Zurich, Switzerland? No, but there is a lot of nuclear stuff to the NW of Zurich and they want to put a nuclear dump 40 minutes due north of Zurich. I checked and that area of South Carolina is around 48% black which for a country (USA) which is 13% black is high. Very sad that they were so proud of their black president, who is now dumping German waste on them!
    
    Ditto for Shelby county (48% black) around Memphis, Tennessee where they are dumping low level rad waste in poor conditions – possibly the low level German rad waste burned at Oak Ridge Tennessee. I think they are dismantling reactor cores in an island in the Mississippi River near Memphis, if I recall correctly. Claiborne county where the Mississippi reactors are is probably a higher percentage African American. It is in the top poorest counties in the USA. This is most likely where they would put a Mississippi dump.
    It’s where the waste sits anyway, while the Las Vegas casino operators block Yucca mountain. These areas of SC, Miss, and Tenn are very poor. Also, the South Dakota uranium mines are in very poor areas with large American Indian-Lakota Sioux populations. I guess that it’s because the US really doesn’t have much or any standards on these things, and Germany may.
    
    But, Germany exporting its waste to Italy, Tennessee and South Carolina certainly looks racist in the broader sense of non-German, because there is plenty of space in the poor, rural parts of Germany and a lot of it is contaminated by Chernobyl fallout and probably from its power plants. Germany is earthquake prone, but oddly enough so is South Carolina. Germany is wet, but not as wet as South Carolina and certainly not as hot, and there would be some suitable geology someplace in Germany I would think – of the hard-rock variety. I saw part of a documentary which said that Germany exported its bad loans to Irish banks and maybe Scottish ones, such that Ireland had to bail the banks out and Germany’s banks did fine. You should inquire about it sometime.
    
    Comment by miningawareness | May 3, 2014
  - A very insightful comment, thank you
    Hope you don’t mind if I use it for an article – it’s something that people should know about
    
    Comment by Christina MacPherson | May 3, 2014
Thanks and my apologies for the misunderstanding about the picture. The links below may be of use to you. There are good maps showing the racial demographics in the USA. Unfortunately, these do not have state or river names. An interesting thing in these census maps is that so much of the northern areas of the US claim predominant German ancestry and the southeastern areas “American” and “African American”. The “Americans” would mostly be those like Obama’s white grandmother, Madelyn Lee Payne, whose ancestors were forced indentured servants prior to the American Revolution. So, essentially, Obama’s dumping German nuclear waste on his own cousins (“Americans”) and those of his wife (“African Americans”). No one talks about the fact that the US was the UK’s prison colony for its political dissidents, religious dissidents, and common criminals prior to the American Revolution. Although the movie-book “Captain Blood” took place in the Caribbean, it is really the same story. After the Revolution, the UK turned to Australia to banish the unwanted, although a lot of Highlanders seem to have ended up in Canada. You, and especially Sean, may be interested by Prebbles’ “Highland Clearances” or his other works. The UK doesn’t allow “right of return” for any of these people. Most are so mixed and with some American Indian, so they wouldn’t know where to return to after hundreds of years. Ireland also played the role of harbouring the banished, though I don’t recall if it was formalized, or if they simply fled there from fear, like Sean has. Some border clans were told to leave the UK ca 1603 or die, and so ended up first in Ireland and later in South Carolina. Many of the banished-deported seem to have passed first through Bermuda or the Caribbean, prior to the US. Most people are familiar with southern slavery but not with the white indentured agricultural workers. Also, at the very beginning, in Virginia, there were black indentures, as opposed to slaves, and these intermarried with white indentures. Additionally, for a long time, the race of the mother was the race of the child, which means that the child of a white mother and black father would be white. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(U.S._region) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/9_Ancestry.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madelyn_Lee_Payne http://blackdemographics.com/states/mississippi/ http://blackdemographics.com/population/black-state-population/ About citizenship based on “blood” as opposed to birth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis The head of the US DOE, Moniz, may have and certainly can obtain Portuguese citizenship which would give him an EU passport. He’s dumping German waste on people who have been in the USA for 100s of years and can’t return to Europe. Moniz CAN return to Europe anytime he wants. There’s something wrong with that! “Portuguese nationality law is the legal set of rules that regulate access to Portuguese citizenship, which is acquired mainly through descent from a Portuguese parent, naturalisation in Portugal or marriage to a Portuguese citizen.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_nationality_law The former head of the DOE was of Chinese origin and hence gets favoured status for migrating to China. Savannah River site is managed by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluor_Corporation Their largest donation was to Senator Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina (R-SC) $8,500 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cycle=2014&cmte=C00034132 Maybe the US is swapping the waste for technical info about the German Pebble Bed Reactor. While my heart screams persecution of the poor and often helpless in South Carolina, who have no place else to go, and an attempt to “finish off” the descendants of the unwanted rebels, my brain suspects waste in exchange for tech documents.

Comment by miningawareness | May 4, 2014 | Reply