Barry GEM 29th May 2018 Graham Vodden: I read with interest your article in The GEM regarding Hinkley Mud, and I have to say that I have no confidence in the National Assembly making the correct decision on this matter. I fully endorse the petition calling for the licence to be suspended to allow for a full environmental assessment before any dredging and dumping is started.
We already have a problem with excess mud coming ashore on Penarth beach because somebody decided years ago to dump local dredged mud out of Cardiff Dock entrance at the North Cardiff buoy, instead of where it used to be dumped at the Middle Pool buoy, where it would disperse and not cause any environmental problem.
The question that needs to be addressed is why does EDF want to bring this mud all the way from Hinkley beach to the North Cardiff Buoy position for dumping? The answer to that is there is already a licence issued for dumping mud or sediment here, which makes the whole process easier.
The other question which needs to be asked is why can’t they dump this sediment outside Hinkley? There is plenty of depth in that part of the channel and it would not cause any problems, it would just disperse. The answer to that is that EDF would have to go through the whole process of licence application again. My message to EDF is, keep your suspect ‘mud’ in the area of Hinkley. The last thing Penarth needs is a massive mud pollution increase on our beach. http://www.barry-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=119999&headline=Why%20does%20EDF%20want%20%20to%20dump%20mud%20from%20%20Hinkley%20on%20our%20coast?§ionIs=news&searchyear=2018
interim stores in places such as Fort St. Vrain could be in business not just for decades but for centuries. The nuclear-waste time bomb will keep ticking.
The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the U.S. Has Left a Huge Mess The demand for atomic energy is in decline. But before the country can abandon its plants, there’s six decades of waste to deal with. The Atlantic , FRED PEARCE It was just another day in the life of the defunct
a remote part of Washington State that made most of the plutonium in America’s Cold War arsenal. On the morning ofMay 9, 2017, alarms sounded. Around 2,000 site workers were told to take cover indoors, and aircraft were banned from flying over the site for several hours. The roof of a tunnel had collapsed, exposing railcars that had been loaded with radioactive waste from plutonium production and then shunted underground and sealed in decades before.
There was other stuff down there too. Nobody quite knew what. Record keeping was poor, but the contents of the tunnels certainly included carcasses from animal radiation experiments, including a reported 18 alligators. The emergency lasted only a few hours. The integrity of the waste was restored. But it was a chilling reminder of the site’s perilous radioactive legacy.
Sprawling across 600 square miles of sagebrush semidesert, Hanford is a $100 billion cleanup burden, full of accidents waiting to happen. It is the biggest headache, but very far from being the only one, emerging in what increasingly look like the final years of America’s nuclear age.
It is 60 years since America’s first commercial nuclear power station was opened by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Shippingport, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 26, 1958. But the hopes of a nuclear future with power “too cheap to meter” are now all but over. All that is left is the trillion-dollar cleanup.
Public fear and suspicion about all things nuclear grew sharply after March 1979, when the cooling system at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station failed and triggered a meltdown. In the end, actual releases of radiation were minimal, but the incident left behind a reputational mess in addition to the radiological one. On the day of the accident, the United States had 140 operating nuclear reactors, with 92 under construction and 28 more awaiting official approval. In the next five years, more than 50 orders for new nuclear reactors in America were canceled. New contracts entirely dried up.
Hanford has not produced plutonium for three decades. Nobody is making new material for bombs anymore. President Trump’s plans for more weapons can be met by recycling existing plutonium stocks. And even the civil nuclear industry, which still generates a fifth of America’s electricity, is in what looks like terminal decline. With cheap natural gas and renewable solar and wind energy increasingly available, the numbers no longer add up. Nuclear power plants across the nation are being closed with years of licensed operation unused.
No new nuclear power stations have come on line in the past two decades. The only new build underway, two additional reactors at Georgia Power’s Alvin W. Vogtle plant near Waynesboro, is five years behind schedule and has seen its costs double. Its planned completion in 2022 remains uncertain.
America’s 99 remaining operational nuclear power reactors, which still deliver power to the grid, are too important to be closed overnight. But nearly half are over 40 years old. The only question is how long the regulators and accountants will allow them to keep going.
Oyster Creek in New Jersey disconnects from the grid in October with 11 years left on its license. Indian Point in New York State is to shut by 2021 due to falling revenues and rising costs. In California, Diablo Canyon is being closed by state regulators in 2025. The reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania that survived the 1979 accident will finally shut in 2019.
Shutdown is only the beginning of the end. Final closure and clearance of the sites can take decades, and the waste crisis created by decommissioning cannot be dodged. Lethal radioactive material is accumulating at dozens of power plants, military facilities, and interim stores across the country.
Some, like the train cars buried at Hanford, is evidently in a precarious situation. Much more needs urgent attention. Cleaning up and safely disposing of the residues of the nuclear adventure—much of it waste with a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years—is turning into a trillion-dollar nightmare for the nation. ………..
How did the United States reach this impasse? Back in 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act established that it was the government’s job to deal with this ultimate back-end problem. The act obliged Washington to begin removing used fuel from stores and other facilities by 1998 for eventual disposal at a federal facility. In 1987, Yucca Mountain, near the former Nevada bomb-testing grounds, was chosen to be the sole such facility.In the 1990s, a five-mile tunnel was dug into the remote mountain. Then work stopped, in part because of vehement state opposition and in part because of concerns raised by geologists that a future volcanic eruption could propel buried waste back to the surface. One of President Obama’s first acts on taking office in 2009 was to formally abandon the $100 billion project. Things headed for the courts, which began awarding damages to power companies unable to make use of the nonexistent federal facility. The payouts amount to around half a billion dollars a year, and by 2022 will likely reach $29 billion.
Now President Trump wants to revive Yucca. His 2019 budget request included $120 million for the task. But the state opposition remains as strong as ever, and only $50 million was included in the final budget for Yucca-related items. Maybe Yucca Mountain will make a comeback. If not, then with no alternatives on the horizon, utilities will carry on being paid to keep spent fuel in pools next to abandoned nuclear power plants, and the interim stores in places such as Fort St. Vrain could be in business not just for decades but for centuries. The nuclear-waste time bomb will keep ticking. This piece is adapted from Pearce’s new book, Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/the-60-year-downfall-of-nuclear-power-in-the-us-has-left-a-huge-mess/560945/
The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the U.S. Has Left a Huge Mess The demand for atomic energy is in decline. But before the country can abandon its plants, there’s six decades of waste to deal with. The Atlantic , FRED PEARCE,
“……… The true heartland of America’s nuclear enterprise has always been Hanford. And it is the biggest and most toxic cleanup legacy too. Straddling the Columbia River, the Hanford nuclear reservation was America’s primary bomb-making factory. It was where they made the plutonium. At peak production, during the 1960s, its nine reactors irradiated 7,000 metric tons of uranium fuel annually. The intense radiation inside the reactors produced plutonium that was then extracted at five reprocessing plants. Hanford produced a total of 67 metric tons of the metal for the American arsenal, before business halted after the Cold War ended.Plutonium production was a huge task. It required much of the electricity generated at the giant Grand Coulee Dam upstream on the Columbia, the largest hydroelectric power producer in the United States. And the mess left behind is equally mind-boggling. Since production ceased, Hanford has been conducting the country’s largest-ever environmental cleanup program. The current expenditure is $2.3 billion a year. By the time it is done the bill will be more than $100 billion.
The site holds an estimated 25 million cubic feet of solid, radioactive waste. Much of it is buried in over 40 miles of trenches and tunnels, up to 24 feet deep, including the stretch that caved in last year. Elsewhere, there are two corroding cooling ponds, each the size of an Olympic swimming pool, containing some 2,000 tons of spent fuel that never got reprocessed.
But the headline Hanford problem is the 56 million gallons of acidic and highly radioactive liquids and sludges, stored in 177 giant tanks, each up to 75 feet in diameter. They are the solvent leftovers from reprocessing, and contain around twice the total radioactivity released from the world’s worst nuclear accident to date, the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl power station in Ukraine.
The tanks have been leaking for over half a century. Around a million gallons are slowly spreading toward the Columbia River, in a plume of contaminated soil covering 80 square miles. Protecting the river and its rich salmon habitat from the radioactive pollution is the number-one cleanup priority for the site’s custodians at the Department of Energy. To head off the flows, engineers are constantly pumping out radioactive water.
A better idea is to stop the leaks at the source by emptying the tanks and solidifying the liquids. The current aim is to heat them with glass-forming materials to create solid blocks that could one day be buried deep underground—maybe at Yucca Mountain. Work on a plant to do this began in 2002. It is currently 25 years behind schedule. Operations are not set to begin until 2036 and, once underway, would take 40 years.
At $17 billion and counting, the project is way over budget. Former plant engineers who have turned whistle-blowers believe it won’t be fit for the job and should be abandoned. They warn of a serious risk that particles of plutonium may settle out in the plant processing tanks, creating the potential for an accidental explosion with a big release of radiation.
The task at Hanford grows ever more daunting. After almost three decades, little of the waste and few of the tanks or processing plants have been cleaned up. Far away in Washington, D.C., some question the continuing money sink. It seems to some like a 21st-century pork barrel. Perhaps, critics say, it would be better to put up a fence and walk away. President Trump, while so far publicly supporting the Hanford cleanup, may privately agree. He has slashed its annual budget by $230 million, or about 10 percent.
Local environmentalists are scandalized. “We have got to clean up the site,” says Dan Serres, the conservation director of Columbia Riverkeeper, a local NGO. The tanks should be emptied and the trenches dug up. “In a hundred years, I’d hope the Native Americans have their treaty rights to this land restored,” agrees Chuck Johnson, of Physicians for Social Responsibility. But Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, who sits on an advisory board at the Hanford Concerns Council, told me: “You are never going to dig all the waste there up.” The tanks will have to be dealt with, but “most of Hanford’s waste volume-wise is going to stay put. Hanford is going to be a national sacrifice zone for hundreds of years.”
The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the U.S. Has Left a Huge Mess The demand for atomic energy is in decline. But before the country can abandon its plants, there’s six decades of waste to deal with. The Atlantic , FRED PEARCE,
“……… Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge is an oasis of prairie biodiversity covering 5,000 acres, home to prairie dogs, elk, monarch butterflies, and rare xeric grasses. It also serves as a buffer zone around the site of the largest completed nuclear cleanup to date in the United States. And David Lucas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing to open it for public access in summer 2018. He’s reckoning on 150,000 visitors a year.During the Cold War, Rocky Flats was secretly machining plutonium manufactured at Hanford into some 70,000 spheres that formed the explosive heart of each weapon in Uncle Sam’s nuclear arsenal. Plutonium pollution was routine. The plant had nowhere to get rid of the day-to-day plutonium waste, which was often dumped in hastily dug landfills or sprayed onto grassland around the plant. At an outdoor compound known as pad 903, where more than 5,000 drums of waste liquids contaminated with plutonium are stored, there’s been substantial leakage. An internal memo reported that rabbits living on the site were heavily contaminated, especially in their hind feet.
A whistle-blower’s allegations about illegal late-night incineration of plutonium waste at the plant led to an FBI raid in 1989. After that—and with demand for plutonium spheres declining following the end of the Cold War—the government closed the site. A federal grand jury sat for three years to hear testimony from the FBI raid. But two days after the jury approved indictments, the Justice Department struck a deal with Rockwell Automation, the company that managed the plant. The company pleaded guilty to some minor charges, but the FBI evidence and grand jury conclusions were sealed forever.
After the cover-up came the cleanup. The core plutonium-handling areas were declared a Superfund site, qualifying for a federal decontamination, which was completed in 2005. The federal government called it “the largest and most successful environmental cleanup in history.” But in reality it was a cut-price job. The original project was estimated at $37 billion, but Congress would sanction only $7 billion. So processing buildings were demolished, but basements and 25 miles of underground tunnels and pipelines were left behind, according to LeRoy Moore, a veteran activist who sat on a public committee in the 1980s that considered the cleanup plans.
Today, the land that housed the industrial complex remains behind a sturdy fence under the control of the Department of Energy (DOE). But the large grassland buffer zone that once protected the complex from prying eyes has been released into the care of the Fish and Wildlife Service for public access.
There are two concerns. First that, as I saw on a tour with Lucas, the fenced-off core area hardly looks self-contained. Earth slips have left ugly gashes up to 300 feet wide across a former landfill site that overlooks a creek running through the wildlife refuge. The DOE’s Scott Surovchak concedes that “slumping is very common” after heavy rain. Only constant repairs, it seems, will prevent the landfills and buried contaminated buildings and pipework from being exposed.
The second concern is the safety of the buffer zone itself. Harvey Nichols, a biologist from the University of Colorado, has found that when the plant was operating snow falling nearby was often “hot.” Falling snowflakes captured tiny plutonium particles that evaded the stack filter. Just two days of snowfall could deposit about 14 million particles on every acre of the site. “There must be tens of billions of particles in the soil today,” he told me.
The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed such concerns. In 2006 it found plutonium levels in soil samples in the buffer zone were within acceptable limits and concluded that the lands comprising the refuge are “suitable for unlimited use and unrestricted exposure.” But Moore, the activist, is unimpressed. “Prairie dogs and other critters will burrow down for several feet and bring plutonium to the surface,” he says. “Children will be exposed to plutonium. And people will start taking plutonium out into their communities on boots and cycle wheels. Why would we allow that?”
Lucas is unmoved. “We need to get people out here on the refuge. Then the fears will evaporate,” he told me. But that is just what worries his opponents. Forgetting about the plutonium is the worst thing that could happen, they say……….This piece is adapted from Pearce’s new book, Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age.
The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the U.S. Has Left a Huge Mess The demand for atomic energy is in decline. But before the country can abandon its plants, there’s six decades of waste to deal with. The Atlantic , FRED PEARCE,
“…….. About 30 miles northeast of Rocky Flats, out on the prairie near the small town of Platteville, is the Fort St. Vrain spent-fuel store. It resembles nothing so much as an outsize grain store, but since the 1990s it has been holding 1,400 spent fuel rods, laced with plutonium and encased in blocks of graphite. The spent fuel was left behind when the neighboring nuclear power plant shut. The plan had been to send it to another temporary store at the Idaho National Laboratory, but the governor of Idaho banned the shipment. The Fort St. Vrain facility is designed to withstand earthquakes, tornado winds of up to 360 miles per hour, and flooding six feet deep. Also time. It will be several decades at least before the federal government finds the fuel a final resting place.
The country is littered with such caches of spent fuel stuck in limbo. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel, the most dangerous of all nuclear wastes, is stored at 80 sites in 35 states. The sites include stores at past and present power plants such as Maine Yankee, and stand-alone federal sites such as Fort St. Vrain. As the GAO puts it: “After spending decades and billions of dollars … the future prospects for permanent disposal remain unclear.” Nobody wants to give the stuff a forever home.
Nuclear waste is conventionally categorized as high-, intermediate-, or low-level. Low-level waste includes everything from discarded protective clothing to plant equipment and lab waste. It can usually be treated like any other hazardous waste, which in practice usually means burial in drums in landfills or concrete-lined trenches.
Intermediate waste contains radioactive materials with isotopes that decay with half-lives long enough to require long-term incarceration. It includes many reactor components, as well as chemical sludges and liquids from processing radioactive materials, which can often be solidified in concrete blocks. Once solid, intermediate waste can be buried safely in shallow graves, though anything containing plutonium will have to be disposed of deep underground because of the very long half-life.
Much of America’s intermediate-level waste will end up at the country’s largest deep-burial site for such radioactive material. The U.S. military’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in salt beds near Carlsbad, New Mexico, could eventually take 6.2 million cubic feet of waste. But it has had problems that have slowed progress and raised questions about its viability.
A chemical explosion in 2014 sprayed the tunnels dug into the salt beds with a white, radioactive foam. When a ventilation filter failed, some of the plutonium reached the surface, where at least 17 surface workers were contaminated. The military shut the tunnels for three years to clean up. While WIPP is today back in business, full operations cannot resume until a new ventilation system is in place, probably in 2021. The eventual cost of the accident, including keeping the dump open longer to catch up with the waste backlog, has been put at $2 billion.
High-level waste is the nastiest stuff. It includes all spent fuel and a range of highly radioactive waste liquids produced when spent fuel is reprocessed, a chemical treatment that extracts the plutonium. Most of America’s high-level waste liquids—and around 30 percent of the world’s total—are in tanks at Hanford.
High-level waste is either very radioactive and will stay so for a long time, or it generates heat and so requires keeping cool. Usually both. It accounts for more than 95 percent of all the radioactivity in America’s nuclear waste, and needs to be kept out of harm’s way for thousands of years.
There is general agreement that the only way to keep high-level waste safe is by turning the liquids into solids and then burying it all deep underground, somewhere where neither water nor seismic activity is likely to bring the radioactivity to the surface, and where nobody is likely to stumble on it unexpectedly. There is disagreement, however, about whether this buried waste should be kept retrievable in case future technologies could make it safer sooner, or whether accessibility simply places a burden of guardianship on future generations.
Before it can be buried, most high-level waste needs to be stored for up to a century while it cools. Unfortunately, this has encouraged countries to put off making plans. None of the world’s high-level waste currently has any permanent resting place. The planet is instead peppered with interim stores. America is no better. Its 90,000 metric tons of high-level waste—set to rise to as much as 140,000 tonnes by the time the last power plant closes—is mostly sitting in ponds at dozens of power stations or lockups like Fort St. Vrain………..https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/the-60-year-downfall-of-nuclear-power-in-the-us-has-left-a-huge-mess/560945/
Federal Nuclear Dumping in Nevada Stirs Statewide Resentment,
For decades, the federal government has treated Nevada as a radioactive waste dumping ground, now the state is fighting back U.S. News byMichael Green May 29, 2018
NEVADANS CAN BE FORGIVEN FOR THINKING THEY ARE IN AN ENDLESS LOOP OF “THE WALKING DEAD” TV SERIES. Their least-favorite zombie federal project refuses to die.
In 2010, Congress had abandoned plans to turn Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, into the nation’s only federal dump for nuclear waste so radioactive it requires permanent isolation. And the House recently voted by a wide margin to resume these efforts.
While teaching and writing about the state’s history for more than 30 years, I have followed the Yucca Mountain fight from the beginning — as well as how Nevadans’ views have evolved on all things nuclear. The project could well go forward, but I believe that it probably won’t as long as there are political benefits to stopping it.
Council opposed to shipping radioactive waste through city Albuquerque Journal By Steve Knight / Journal Staff Writer May 28th, 2018 Albuquerque city councilors voted 4-3 – with one abstention – to approve a memorial opposing transportation of high-level radioactive waste by railway through the city for temporary consolidated storage in southeastern New Mexico……..
The memorial is in reaction to a Holtec International application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store up to 100,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel in a temporary in-ground storage facility in Lea County, halfway between Carlsbad and Hobbs.
But the highlight – if there is such a thing when discussing the issue of nuclear waste – came when Sam Pruitt, a sixth-grade student-to-be at Monte Vista Elementary School, had his say about the matter.
Barry GEM 28th May 2018 ,Richard Bramhall. Referring to The GEM’s recent article on the dumping of
mud from Hinkley Point in the Bristol Channel, campaigners oppose the
dumping not because of ‘passion’ but because of science.
EDF’s references to bananas, radon and cosmic rays are unscientific. Potassium 40
(in the bananas), radon and cosmic rays are evenly distributed in body
tissue and the radiation effects are well understood.
The radioactive particles which EdF refuses to look for in the mud are quite different. The
UN has published data showing enormous amounts of particulates from Hinkley
Point. These are microscopic fragments of uranium oxide and probably
plutonium which are small enough to inhale. From the lung they can travel
anywhere in the body — to the lymph nodes, for example. Such particles
emit very short-range radiations all the time, continually hitting the
cells within a few microns. To treat this as an average all-body dose is
like thinking you can safely keep your baby warm by tucking a soldering
iron into her babygro. The Government laboratory that tested mud samples
did not use techniques capable of detecting uranium or plutonium. This is
why campaigners demand thorough testing. http://www.barry-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=119988&headline=%E2%80%98Hinkley%20Point%20mud%20needs%20more%20testing%E2%80%99%20%E2%80%93%20a%20GEM%20reader%27s%20letter§ionIs=news&searchyear=2018
BBC 23rd May 2018 Plans to move mud from alongside the Hinkley Point nuclear site in Somerset
to a dumping ground off Cardiff Bay have been debated by AMs. It comes
after a petition to the assembly against the plans attracted over 7,000
signatures. Other online petitions gathered tens of thousands of
signatures. The assembly petitions committee took evidence on the issue and
published a summary of the evidence it had heard and requested the debate
in the Senedd.
As part of plans to build the new Hinkley Point C nuclear
power station in Somerset – 300,000 tonnes needs to be dredged from the
seabed nearby. The developers are set to move it within weeks to a disposal
site off Cardiff Bay. Both developers EDF and Natural Resources Wales
insist tests have shown the sediment poses no risk but campaigners claim it
could be contaminated by discharges from the old Hinkley Point A and B and
argue the mud has not been adequately tested.
Plaid Cymru’s Simon Thomas said the issue illustrated that “we have so little control of our natural
resources, that we have to accept the spoil of a nuclear power station in
Hinkley Point”. He said that as a matter of principle it is was the Welsh
parliament that should decide what happens in Welsh waters.
The company behind Hinkley Point C – EDF – said the mud has been tested independently
to internationally accepted standards and shown to pose no risk to human
health or the environment. It has refused a Petitions Committee request to
pay for further sampling – arguing claims the mud is toxic are alarmist and
wrong, and that any sampling would yield the same results and would not
remove the petitioner’s objection about the testing process. Energy
Secretary Lesley Griffiths said Natural Resources Wales was satisfied there
was no risk from the dredged material to people, the environment, or the
wildlife that lives there. However, she said she has asked NRW to review
the way it communicated its decisions over this licence.
Independent AM Neil McEvoy, who met the demonstrators, dismissed the suggestion the mud
had been tested properly and described the situation as a “dereliction of
duty”. He said: “We have a Welsh Government allowing Wales to be dumped on
and the mud hasn’t been tested… The top soil was tested – [but] you’ve
got five samples only under five centimetres for 300,000 tonnes of mud.”
Anti-nuclear campaigner Tim Deere Jones, who submitted the petition, is
unhappy with the level of testing undertaken. He said: “What kind of
radioactivity is in the mud, how much of it is in the mud, if you dump it
into the Cardiff grounds which is a dispersal site – where will it disperse
to?”
Richard Bramhall is from the Low Level Radiation Campaign, chairman of
the Welsh Anti Nuclear Alliance and a former member of the government
advisory committee advising on the radiation effects of internal emitters. “The idea that the average radioactivity in the mud is at a low level is of no comfort at all to the people of south Wales,” he said. “The particles will blow ashore and once they’re in your lungs that’s not a low dose.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-44223979
Global News, By Colin Perkel The Canadian Press 24 May 18, TORONTO — Of the three main parties vying for office in Ontario’s spring election, only the NDP has spoken out against building a $2.4-billion nuclear waste bunker near Lake Huron.
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said the idea of burying radioactive waste so close to a major fresh-water source worries her and, should she be elected on June 7, would look to intervene against the project. “As a party, we’re not in favour of having that facility in that location,” Horwath said recently on the campaign trail. “It’s something that we’re quite concerned about. We know that other leaders, both in Canada and across the border in the States, have sent significant letters of concern and protest to the federal government in regard to the siting of this facility.” ………
scores of communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border have expressed alarm at the proposal. They maintain the consequences of contaminating the all-important fresh-water source is far too great to take. “I hear big concerns from many different jurisdictions as well as individuals as well as communities,” Horwath said.
……… more than 100 mayors and other elected officials on both sides of the border — they claim to speak for 16 million people — urged federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in November to reject the proposed bunker. They noted that local, county and state governments representing 23 million people had passed 230 resolutions opposing the burial of nuclear waste anywhere in the Great Lakes basin.Horwath agreed.
NuClear News No.107 May 2018 The deadline for responding to the Government’s two consultations on a Geological Disposal facility (GDF) has now passed. According to the GDF Watch website there was a lot of discussion around three particular areas: the role of Local Authorities; earlier funding for community engagement; and readiness of RWM to engage with communities. (1
) BEIS produced two FAQ briefings in response to a number of common and recurring questions raised at their regional consultation workshops.
MPs from both major parties have attacked the government’s latest incentive to entice communities into volunteering to host Britain’s first deep underground store for nuclear waste as “completely inadequate”. Ministers have offered up to £1m per community for areas that constructively engage in offering to take part in the scheme, and a further sum of up to £2.5m where deep borehole investigations take place.
Critics say the inducements offered by the government are “simply not good enough”, and point to the example of France, which has a similar amount of nuclear waste. It offers around €30m (£26.5m) a year as local support for districts neighbouring the site at Bure, in north-east France, and has also offered €60m in community projects. “The government’s offer in its consultation is simply not good enough. These communities are being asked to perform an important public service and should be properly recompensed,” said Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary.
Geoff Betsworth, chairman of the Cumbria Trust points out that a 10% dent in tourism in Cumbria “would cost £270m a year. The offer of £1m in community benefits, rising to £2.5m when boreholes begin, is absurdly low.”
The plan was also criticised by the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who said the UK should stop making nuclear waste and stop building new reactors. “We are still pouring untold billions of taxpayer money into propping up an industry that the free market would have killed off years ago,” he said. “In return, we will be compounding the catastrophe of a nuclear waste build-up, which we are no closer to solving than we were when the industry was born.” (2)
Burial under National Parks? Ministers have also been attacked for refusing to rule out burying nuclear waste under national parks. The government’s response to a question in the House of Lords was branded “absolutely shocking” by Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas. Labour peer Lord Judd asked ministers to promise national parks, protected areas and areas of outstanding natural beauty will be excluded from the search. But energy minister Lord Henley said he was “not excluding” those areas yet while a National Policy Statement is finalised. He insisted: “Development for a Geological Disposal Facility should only be consented in nationally designated areas in exceptional circumstances and where it would be in the public interest to do so. “Even if such development were consented, the developer would be required to take a number of measures to protect and where possible improve the environment.” (3)
Burial under the seabed In response to another written question, Lord Henley said a GDF could also be placed under the sea: “The design could allow the underground facilities to extend offshore if accessed from onshore surface sites.” (4)
The former chair of the Cumbria Managing Radioactive Waste Partnership, Tim Knowles, mentions that the idea of looking for a site under the sea off the coast of Cumbria has been discussed. Cumbria Trust says “while we have had expert advice that West Cumbria does not contain an adequate onshore site, we accept that it is possible that a good site may be found further offshore.” (5)
The Trust says: “It is quite possible that an onshore GDF is simply politically undeliverable anywhere in the UK, so the expansion of the offshore search area is to be welcomed. An offshore GDF would need significant surface facilities on land, occupying around one square kilometre. The obvious location for these would be on the Sellafield site, but only if the offshore geology proves suitable, and if the local population agrees. The tunnel to the offshore GDF should begin at Sellafield to avoid the need to package radioactive waste for transportation outside a nuclear site.
This would also minimise any blight on local businesses, properties and tourism – the waste would remain on the Sellafield site until it was ready to enter the GDF via the tunnel.” (6)
Folkestone & Hythe District Council (FHDC) has asked the Government for more information on its Geological Disposal Facility (GDF). It is apparently considering volunteering Romney Marsh as a site for nuclear waste. This isn’t the first time nuclear waste has been up for debate on the marsh, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) asked councils to come forward as potential sites four years ago, but after some deliberation Shepway council scrapped the plans. Then, councillors voted 21 to 13 against formally expressing interest in the project. The issue had split residents, with 63% of people rejecting it in a survey. (7)
Fears have also been raised Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. A sedimentary basin known as the Widmerpool Gulf – which extends across the three East Midland Counties could be a potential site A response to a Government package of incentives designed to get communities to agree to ‘host’ a storage complex has been discussed by Leicestershire County Council, according to the Leicester Mercury. Any facility would look to bury waste at least 200 metres below ground somewhere in a geological area which stretches from the eastern fringes of Derby across the countryside to the south of Nottingham and on to the west of Melton Mowbray in north Leicestershire. Leicestershire County Council has said there are no specific proposals for a GDF in Leicestershire at this stage but it has asked for further information on the issue from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. A Leicestershire County Council report said: “Building and operating a GDF is a multi-billion pound, intergenerational, national infrastructure project, which is likely to bring substantial benefits to its host community, with skilled jobs for hundreds of people over many decades.”(8) http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/NuClearNewsNo107.pdf
EXTRACT from: A journey to the heart of the anti-nuclear resistance in Australia: Radioactive Exposure Tour 2018, NUCLEAR MONITOR Author: Ray Acheson ‒ NM859.4719, May 2018 “……The federal government of Australia wants to build a facility to store and dispose of radioactive waste in South Australia, either at Wallerberdina Station near Hawker or on farming land in Kimba.
Wallerberdina Station is located in the Flinders Ranges, the largest mountain range in South Australia, 540 million years old. Approaching from the north on our drive down from Lake Eyre can only be described as breathtaking. The red dirt, the brown and green bush, and the ever-changing purples, blues, and reds of the mountains themselves are some of the most complex and stunning scenes one can likely see in the world.
Most people might find it shocking that the federal government would want to put a nuclear waste dump smack in the middle of this landscape. But after visiting other sites on the Rad Tour, it was only yet another disappointment ‒ and another point of resistance.
What is known is that the Wallerberdina site is of great cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the Adnyamathanha people. It borders the Yappala Indigenous Protected Area, which is a crucial location for biodiversity in the Flinders Ranges. Its unique ecosystem provides a refuge for many native species of flora and fauna, contains many archaeological sites as well as the first registered Aboriginal Songline of its type in Australia, and is home to Pungka Pudanha, a natural spring and sacred woman’s site.
In case that isn’t enough, the area is a known floodplain. Our travels around the proposed site contained ample evidence of previous floods that sent massive trees rushing down the plain, smashing into each other and into various bridges and other built objects. The last big flood occurred in 2006.
The Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners were not consulted before their land was nominated for consideration by the government for the waste dump. “Through this area are registered cultural heritage sites and places of huge importance to our family, our history and our future,” wrote Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners in a 2015 statement. “We don’t want a nuclear waste dump here on our country and worry that if the waste comes here it will harm our environment and muda (our lore, our creation, our everything).”
We met Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners Vivianne and Regina McKenzie, and Tony Clark, at the proposed site. They invited us into the Yappala Indigenous Protected Area to view the floodplains and swim in the beautiful Pungka Pudanha. We’d just been camping at Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges National Park only a few kilometres away. It is impossible to understand the government’s rationale for wanting to build a toxic waste dump on this land so cherished by its Traditional Owners, local communities, and tourists alike.
The McKenzies have been working tirelessly to prevent the proposed dump from being established, as have other local activists. Fortunately, they have some serious recent successes to inspire them. In 2015, the federal government announced a plan to import 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste from around the world to South Australia as a commercial enterprise. But Traditional Owners began protesting immediately, arguing that the so-called consultations were not accessible and that misinformation was rife. In 2016, a Citizen’s Jury, established by then Premier Jay Weatherill and made up of 350 people, deliberated over evidence and information. In November that year, two-thirds of the Jury rejected “under any circumstances” the plan to import or store high-level waste.24 They cited lack of Aboriginal consent, unsubstantiated economic assumptions and projections, and lack of confidence in the governmental proposal’s validity.
Other battles against proposed nuclear waste dumps have been fought and won in South Australia. From 1998 to 2004, the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a council of senior Aboriginal women from northern South Australia, successfully campaigned against a proposed national nuclear waste dump near Woomera. In an open letter in 2004, the Kungkas wrote: “People said that you can’t win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. Government has big money to buy their way out but we never gave up.”
Connected communities
The attempts by the Australian government and the nuclear industry to impose a waste dump in the Flinders Ranges, just like their attempts to impose waste dumps and uranium mines elsewhere in the country, or their refusal to compensate victims and survivors of nuclear testing, are all mired with racism. They are rooted in a fundamental dismissal and devaluation of the lives and experiences of indigenous Australians, and of proximity to cities but more importantly, to power.The industry and government’s motivations for imposing nuclear violence on these people and this land are militarism and capitalism.
Profit over people. Weapons over wellbeing. Their capacity for compassion and duty of care has been constrained by chronic short-termism ‒ a total failure to protect future generations. The poison they pull out of the earth, process, sell, allow others to make bombs with, and bury back in the earth, wounds us all now and into the future.
But nuclear weapons are now prohibited under international law. New actors are challenging the possession of nuclear weapons in new ways, and nucleararmed states are facing a challenge like never before.
The nuclear energy industry ‒ and thus the demand for uranium ‒ is declining. Power plants are being shuttered; corporations are facing financial troubles. Dirty and dangerous, the nuclear industry is dying.
This is in no small part due to the relentless resistance against it. This resistance was fierce throughout all of the country we visited, from Woomera up to Lake Eyre, from Roxby Downs to the Flinders Ranges. We listened to stories of those living on this land, we heard their histories, witnessed their actions, and supported their plans…..
2 gallons of radioactive nuclear waste done. 56M gallons to go, BY ANNETTE CARY acary@tricityherald.comRICHLAND, WA 17 May 18
Researchers in Richland have done what the $17 billion vitrification plant at Hanford is intended to do — turn radioactive waste into a solid glass form.
Over about 24 hours last month researchers ran a laboratory-sized plant, dripping a radioactive waste mixture into a miniature melter inside the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory.
When they were done, they had 20 pounds of glass encasing actual Hanford waste.
……….The vitrification plant — or Waste Treatment Plant — at the Hanford nuclear reservation has been under construction since 2002, with a court-ordered deadline of 2023 to start treating some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in underground tanks.
Much of the waste, which is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program, is planned to be vitrified, or turned into a solid glass form for disposal.
In the past about a cup of waste at a time has been vitrified — but not in a way that really mimics the system to be used at the plant.
Scientists have not been able to determine in earlier tests how the plant’s process would control the chemistry of the mixture, which determines how well waste is contained within the mixture as vitrification progresses from liquid waste to molten glass.
“This is the first time low-activity Hanford tank waste has been vitrified in a continuous process, very similar to the treatment process that will be used at Hanford, rather than as a single batch,” said Albert Kruger, a Hanford Department of Energy glass scientist.
Results of the demonstration will be used to help DOE and its tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, make plans for operating the vitrification plant. They commissioned the tests from PNNL, an expert in the vitrification field.
…… At Hanford, DOE’s plan is to separate some low-activity radioactive waste from the site’s underground tanks, leaving high-level radioactive waste for later treatment at the vitrification plant……… Low activity radioactive waste is primarily liquid, but solids and radioactive cesium in the liquids are designated as high level radioactive waste and must be removed if the waste is treated as low activity waste…….http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article211071854.html
FAIRBANKS — An Army Corp of Engineers team is planning the formal decommissioning of the only nuclear power plant ever built in Alaska, Fort Greely’s SM-1A plant.
The SM-1A plant provided steam and electricity to the Army post near Delta Junction off and on between 1962 and 1972. It was one of eight experimental projects to test the use of small nuclear power plants at remote installations.
It’s expected to take about 10 years to plan, contract out and complete the SM-1A cleanup, according to a Baltimore-based team from the Army Corps of Engineers that came to Fort Greely for meetings last month……….
When SM-1A shut down in 1972, the Army chose to place the facility into a safe storage status instead of formally decommissioning it. The highly enriched uranium fuel and waste were shipped out of Alaska and radioactive components of the reactor were encased in cement.
The Army chose this temporary method of mothballing the facility out of hope that within a relatively short amount of time significant quantities of radioactive waste would decay to a safer nonradioactive state, according to an Army Corps of Engineers website about the SM-1A at bit.ly/2G7TjVH.
Later studies showed that the volume of radioactive waste wasn’t decreasing as expected and that a more hands-on approach was needed to clean up the plant. The increasing costs of nuclear waste disposal also motivated the Army to begin cleaning up the site.
There’s no estimate yet for the cost of decomissioning SM-1A, but such a project for a similar power plant has a budget of $66.4 million.
Trump administration axes project to generate power from plutonium, Timothy Gardner, WASHINGTON (Reuters) 13 May 18 – The Trump administration plans to kill a project it says would have cost tens of billions of dollars to convert plutonium from Cold War-era nuclear bombs and burn it to generate electricity, according to a document it sent to Congress last week.
The Department of Energy submitted a document on May 10 to Senate and House of Representative committees saying that the Mixed Oxide (MOX) project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would cost about $48 billion more than $7.6 billion already spent on it. The United States has never built a MOX plant.
Instead of completing MOX, the administration, like the Obama administration before it, wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium – enough to make about 8,000 nuclear weapons – with an inert substance and bury it underground in a New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Burying the plutonium would cost about $19.9 billion, according to the document, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.
“We are currently processing plutonium in South Carolina for shipment (to WIPP) … and intend to continue to do so,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a letter sent to committee leaders.
Legislation passed in February allows the Energy Department to advance burying the plutonium if it showed that the cost would be less than half of completing MOX……..
Edwin Lyman, a physicist at science advisory group the Union of Concerned Scientists concerned about plutonium getting into the wrong hands, said Perry had made a sensible decision. “MOX was a slow-motion train wreck, and throwing good money after bad simply wasn’t an option.”
