nuclear-news

Deb Katz: There’s no end in sight to the crisis in nuclear waste

Clean water, clean air, clean land, and a safe place to live are our right. We must fight for the cleanup of all communities and stop the targeting of Black, brown and white communities alike to nuclear contamination.

November 1, 2023, by Deb Katz, executive director of the Citizen Awareness Network, based in Shelburne, Mass.   https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/01/deb-katz-theres-no-end-in-sight-to-the-crisis-in-nuclear-waste/

What remains at the site of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant? Millions of curies of high-level waste on the banks of the Connecticut River with no destination, no solution. 

The NorthStar plan? To ship its problem 2,000 miles away to Andrews County in Texas for “temporary storage.” The 5th Circuit shot down NorthStar’s plans to shuffle its toxic waste problem off on a working poor Hispanic community. This waste will be dangerous for a million years. 

This is the colossal failure of nuclear power. There is no present solution to deal with the legacy of Vermont Yankee or any other reactor. This is the abject failure of the nuclear industry and the federal government.

The nuclear industry promised a solution by the time reactors shuttered. Sixty years later, there is no solution and no permanent solution forthcoming. There is waste with nowhere to go.

The industry routinely engages in environmental racism to deal with its waste problems. It is reprehensible. The industry targets working poor, people of color, and Indigenous tribes for its nuclear fuel chain. It pits reactor and targeted communities against each other over who will suffer nuclear power’s final solution.

Citizens Awareness Network opposes these false solutions. Without a permanent repository, any establishment of centralized interim storage is merely a way to make the industry’s waste problem disappear. Potentially it will de facto become the industry’s “permanent” solution.

We can’t accept that another community will suffer to clean our community up. We accept that the waste must remain onsite until the government does its job. This isn’t easy. 

Dangers remain, whether from acts of malice or climate disruption. Vermont Yankee’s canisters sit in the open on a pad on the banks of the river. 

The National Governors’ Council stated that the high-level nuclear waste at reactor sites were pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction. It urged Congress to take action to protect these sites. Congress has yet to act. 

Then there is climate change. The National Academy of Science in February began a study to address what it calls “probability of maximum precipitation” events. The study focuses on infrastructure, dams and energy generation including nuclear sites. It addresses their vulnerability to PMP events. Included in the study are representatives from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both acknowledged that there is no guidance in place to direct their actions to address these events and the vulnerability of these sites. 

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that they were 20 years behind the curve in addressing these issues. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that the agency concerns were raised in response to the Fukushima accident. 

For all its claims, nuclear power is neither clean nor green. It is a dirty, toxic technology. It relies on its invisibility to keep its lies going.

Clean water, clean air, clean land, and a safe place to live are our right. We must fight for the cleanup of all communities and stop the targeting of Black, brown and white communities alike to nuclear contamination.

November 3, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes