By Kim Sung-hwan, staff reporter New report finds that nuclear power phaseout could save nearly $17 billion in maintenance costs
The cost of managing the “spent nuclear fuel” irradiated in nuclear plants has steadily increased and now exceeds 64 trillion won (US$57.2 billion), a new report confirms. If the government implements its policy of a nuclear phaseout, it could reduce this maintenance cost by as much as 19 trillion won (US$16.9 billion), according to the report.
A report on the current maintenance cost for spent nuclear fuel that Minjoo Party lawmaker Lee Hun, a member of the National Assembly’s Industry, Trade, Resources and SME Committee, received from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on July 25 states that as of 2016 the cost needed to maintain the spent nuclear fuel for 36 nuclear reactors (including one that is permanently shuttered, 24 that are operational, five that are under construction and six whose construction is planned) is 64.13 trillion won. “The Radioactive Waste Maintenance Cost Calculation Committee, which determines the cost of spent nuclear fuel, calculated that the project cost as of 2016 was 64.13 trillion won, but the government has been publishing the project cost calculated in 2015 [of 53.28 trillion won],” Lee said.
“Since we were unable to submit a motion for approval of the project cost to the cost management review board at the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, we included the previous year’s project cost in the basic plan for managing high-level radioactive waste, which was released in July of that year,” the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said in regard to why it had published an outdated project cost. The project cost for maintaining spent nuclear fuel has been steadily increasing as more nuclear reactors have been built, rising from 22.62 trillion won (with 28 reactors) between 2004 and 2012 to 53.28 trillion won (with 34 reactors) from 2013 to 2015.
The project cost has been increasing because of the need to keep building interim storage facilities inside the nuclear reactors to store spent nuclear fuel and the need to set aside a reserve fund for permanently disposing this waste (and no decision has been reached about where or how this waste will be disposed). “The project cost has increased because the cost of regional support, including storage fees, and the contingency preparation cost, including the cost of insurance, had not been explicitly included. We need to calculate the figures more specifically by launching another public debate about spent nuclear fuel,” the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said.
But implementing the government’s policy of a nuclear phaseout could shave around 19 trillion won off the spent nuclear fuel project cost, the report says. While 64.13 trillion won is required for 36 reactors (including Shin-Kori reactors 5 and 6, on which construction is currently suspended, and the reactors whose construction is planned), the cost for 28 reactors (including Shin-Kori 4 and Shin-Hanul 1 and 2, which have been completely built) would be 44.89 trillion won. The total cost of decommissioning nuclear reactors could be reduced by as much as 5.15 trillion won under the policy of the nuclear phaseout, the report found. The cost of decommissioning a single reactor was 59.5 billion won when it was first calculated in 1983, but by 2015, this had increased to 643.7 billion won.
“The government is deceiving the public when it publishes a lower project cost. Considering that the post-processing costs for nuclear reactors are increasing astronomically and that safety concerns continue to be raised about the unprecedented concentration of nuclear reactors, this is a situation that calls for serious deliberation and a reasonable social consensus about phasing out nuclear power,” Lee said.
Senator Dean Heller released a statement on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s vote to use past unobligated funds for work related to its review of the Department of Energy’s application for authorization to construct a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Heller says it’s another waste of taxpayer money on a failed project that has already cost the federal government billions of dollars over the past 30 years. It’s irresponsible for the NRC to move forward on Yucca Mountain given that it’s unknown how much funding if any it will ultimately receive. Heller calls it a reckless and fiscally irresponsible decision to throw more taxpayer dollars on a project that Nevada continues to reject.
SC Attorney General sues feds for $100 million over plutonium left behind, BY JOHN MONK jmonk@thestate.com, AUGUST 08, 2017 COLUMBIA, SC
The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office announced Tuesday it has filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to recover an eye-catching $100 million it says the U.S. Department of Energy owes the state for failing to make good on a promise to remove one ton of plutonium from the Savannah River Site this year.
“A case of such magnitude has never been filed by South Carolina against the federal government,” a press release from the attorney general’s office said.
The press release said that Congress mandated that the U.S. Department of Energy would pay South Carolina $1 million per day, beginning Jan. 1, 2016, for every day the department failed to remove from the state one metric ton of weapons-grade defense plutonium. The requirement is in place during the first 100 days of each year from 2016 through 2021.
“The Department of Energy has failed to process or remove the plutonium or pay the state the $100 million owed for 2016 or 2017. This lawsuit seeks the recovery of the $100 million owed for 2017,” the press release said……http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article166008462.html
Plutonium detected in air near public Highway 240 at Hanford, BY ANNETTE CARY, acary@tricityherald.com, AUGUST 08, 2017 Radioactive plutonium and americium have been found in air samples collected at the Rattlesnake Barricade just off public Highway 240, where workers enter the secure area of the Hanford nuclear reservation, according to the state Department of Health.
Air samples were collected by the Department of Health on June 8, the day that workers at the Plutonium Finishing Plant were ordered to take cover indoors because of an airborne release of radioactive particles during demolition of the highly contaminated facility.
Analysis results for the air samples were received Monday, Department of Health officials said at a Hanford Advisory Board committee meeting Tuesday in Richland.
The Environmental Protection Agency is pouring nearly $40 million into the rehabilitation of a former Ridgewood factory that once produced radioactive materials for the Manhattan Project.
More than three years after the EPA first declared the plot of land on the Ridgewood-Bushwick border between 1125 and 1139 Irving Ave. a federal Superfund site, the agency announced last Friday it plans to spend $39.4 million on extensive, long-term remediation efforts there.
“Today’s comprehensive cleanup proposal addresses potential long-term risks through a combination of response actions,” the EPA’s announcement reads, “including permanent relocation of commercial businesses, demolishing contaminated buildings, excavating contaminated soil and cleaning or replacing contaminated sewers.”
To further discuss the plan, the EPA will hold a public meeting at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 16 at the Audrey Johnson Day Care Center, located at 272 Moffat St., just one block south of the site in question.
The Wolff-Alport Chemical Co. occupied the plot of land in question from 1920 until 1954 and processed imported monazite sand among other chemicals.
Monazite contains up to 8 percent thorium, a radioactive element that the company sold to the federal government for use in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program aimed at developing the atomic bombs that were eventually dropped on Japan during World War II.
During and after Wolff-Alport’s aiding of the Manhattan Project, the company regularly dumped thorium waste into the sewer system and on its property until 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission ordered it to stop.
Wolff-Alport continued to sell thorium products to the government until 1954.
The EPA began investigating the level of contamination at the site in 2012, with the agency discovering radon gas leaks at two locations in and around it — in addition to higher than normal contamination levels below public sidewalks and in the sewer system.
About $2 million in short-term remediation efforts to curb the leaking of the harmful gas was spent at the time.
To further rectify the situation, the EPA plans to permanently relocate five businesses -— including a deli, a pair of auto body shops, a construction company and a warehouse — before tearing down the former factory buildings they reside in.
The EPA said it will “support and assist” the relocation of those entities.
Once that is complete, the agency will then excavate about 24,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and dispose of it off-site, eliminating the potential threat of long-term health impacts posed by the radiation.
That solution is something Community Board 5 Chairman Vincent Arcuri Jr. advocated for years ago. Citing Wolff-Alport’s role in the secretive Manhattan Project, he told the Chronicle in 2014 there may have been operations at the former factory that weren’t ever made public — resulting in more contamination than believed.
“The real approach is to demolish and excavate the entire site,” Arcuri said, “in order to see what the extent of the contamination is.”
Also in 2014, the EPA released a 39-page report about the hazards at the Ridgewood site. While it was strongly worded at times, the report said radiation levels of 1,133 picocuries per gram were observed during one on-site visit.
That amount equates to about one-millionth of a millicure. In comparison, a heart scan produces about 30 millicuries of radiation.
Despite the seemingly low levels of hazardous materials, the EPA plugged a hole in an unoccupied storage area of nearby IS 384, from which radon gas was seeping, in addition to placing lead and steel shields underneath area sidewalks and building floors.
The agency said last Friday that those actions have sufficiently brought down the levels of radiation, while EPA spokesman Elias Rodriguez said the school will not be subjected to any further remediation efforts.
“Our sampling and assessment shows that IS 384 is not being impacted by the contamination at Wolff-Alport,” Rodriguez said in a Monday email.
In addition to the Aug. 16 meeting, the EPA is accepting public comments on the proposal through Aug. 28.
They can be emailed to EPA Remedial Project Manager Thomas Mongelli at mongelli.thomas@epa.gov.
Get Reading 1st Aug 2017, Something has gone seriously wrong’ at AWE Aldermaston, says nuclear expert. Government inspectors raised serious concerns when the warhead factory failed to produce a plan for dealing with high activity radioactive waste.
The Invisible War On American Soil, Topic, 29 July 17 Photographs by Nina Berman
War is a dirty, dirty business. Beyond the damage inflicted on the battlefields themselves, every part of a military operation marks the earth. From munitions factories to massive supply lines, collateral costs abound.GIVEN THE SIZE OF OUR DEFENSE BUDGETS, it should come as no surprise that the United States military is one of the planet’s most prolific and chronic polluters. Perhaps more surprising is that this impacts life within the U.S. as well as overseas. Vast stretches of the American landscape are contaminated by the business of war and armed aggression; it’s littered with unexploded ordnance, toxic chemicals, depleted uranium, radioactive particles, and more.
In this essay, we examine seven such sites of environmental damage wrought by the nation’s military and its weapons contractors. The places range from sites in New Mexico, where nuclear weapons have been produced, to the Passaic River in New Jersey, where dioxin from Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War has poisoned the riverbed. As the technology of warfare changes, so has its impact, with current contamination coming from the skies—such as on Whidbey Island, Washington, where Navy testing of EA-18G Growler planes might be making residents ill.
Acid Canyon; Los Alamos, New Mexico……
Trinity Site; White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico……
Haystack Mine; Haystack Mountain, New Mexico……
White Sands Missile Range Museum; New Mexico……
Luis Lopez Cemetery; New Mexico……
San Antonio, New Mexico…….
Fort Wingate, New Mexico …..
Whidbey Island, Washington…..
Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge; Madison, Indiana…..
Near the Starmet Superfund site; Concord, Massachusetts…..
Piketon, DOE spar over proposed on-site waste site, ChillicotheGazette, Chris Balusik, Reporter, July 30, 2017 PIKETON – As those involved with cleanup operations at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon celebrate the most recent funding allocated for work to create an on-site waste disposal facility, officials within Piketon’s village government are stepping up efforts to prove that work should be stopped.
Officials from the village met with a representative of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency July 10 to discuss conclusions reached by a third-party environmental consultant, The Ferguson Group’s Karl Kalbacher, who the village hired to evaluate plans for a 100-acre disposal cell that would handle low-level contaminated waste from the cleanup work.
The disposal cell has been touted as a cost saving for the cleanup of that low-level waste would not have to be shipped off the DOE property, and a Record of Decision approving the project called it a safer option because of increased accident risks involved with transporting waste to other locations.
Waste with higher levels of contamination would still be sent elsewhere for disposal.
Concerns explained
In his review of the more than 4,000-page DOE study used to create the Record of Decision, Kalbacher concluded that cracks exist in the bedrock below the level represented in the Record of Decision, creating a potential problem. The Record of Decision evaluated three options for waste disposal from the cleanup work, including no action at all, the creation of the on-site disposal facility and shipping all waste off site.
“The (Record of Decision) says that DOE will dig down to competent bedrock, but their landfill construction specifications leave large areas of fractured bedrock in place which will create a faster pathway for low-level nuclear and hazardous wastes to migrate and could also undermine the structural integrity of the landfill,” Kalbacher said. “It simply should not be constructed this way and, at a minimum, it must be modified. We don’t know why or how Ohio EPA concurred with this.”
Kalbacher further voiced concerns that the site would be in violation of a Toxic Substances Control Act provision requiring that the bottom of a landfill line system be installed at least 50 feet from historic high-water tables. The data from DOE, he contends, states the depth of groundwater in some areas of the landfill site is as shallow as 21 feet below the surface, making it impossible to meet the 50 feet requirement.
Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer, in a press release, said the results of the review show problems with the process that led to the Record of Decision and accused DOE of lying to village residents……..
“What else has to happen for people to recognize this whole path forward is flawed?” Spencer said. “The bedrock is cracked and we have a neighbor 1,000 feet from where this thing is supposed to be built. DOE has lied to the public about the geological conditions. They were caught in the lie, yet the Ohio EPA doesn’t seem to think anything ought to change.”
Spencer went on to say that opposition to the creation of the disposal cell has been consistent from the village, the Site Specific Advisory Board, two townships and two school districts in the area. He also said that money already spent on the project should not be considered as having gone to waste if work was stopped…..
METI maps out suitable nuclear waste disposal sites,Japan Times, 28 July 17 KYODOThe government on Friday unveiled a nationwide map of potential disposal sites for high-level nuclear waste that identifies coastal areas as “favorable” and those near active faults as unsuitable.
Based on the map, the government is expected to ask the municipalities involved to let researchers study whether sites on their land can host atomic waste disposal sites.
But the process promises to be both difficult and complicated as public concern lingers over the safety of nuclear power since the triple core meltdown in Fukushima Prefecture in March 2011.
The map, illustrated in four colors indicating the suitability of geological conditions, was posted on the website of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry…..
To permanently dispose of high-level nuclear waste, it must be stored at a repository more than 300 meters underground so it cannot harm human life or the environment.
The map identifies about 70 percent of Japan as suitable for hosting nuclear dumps. Up to 900 municipalities, or half of the nation’s total, encompass coastal areas deemed favorable for permanent waste storage.
Areas near active faults, volcanoes and oil fields, which are potential drilling sites, are deemed unsuitable because of “presumed unfavorable characteristics,” and hence colored in orange and silver on the map.
The other areas are classified as possessing “relatively high potential” and colored in light green.
Among the potential areas, zones that are within 20 km (12 miles) of the coastline are deemed especially favorable in terms of waste transportation and colored in green. The ministry formulated the classification standards in April.
Parts of giant Fukushima Prefecture, where decontamination and recovery efforts remain underway from the mega-quake, tsunami and triple core meltdown of March 2011, are also suitable, according to the map. But Seko said the government has no plans at this stage to impose an additional burden on the prefecture.
Seko also signaled that Aomori Prefecture, which hosts a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility, is exempt from the hunt because the prefectural government and the state have agreed not to build a nuclear waste disposal facility there.
“Nobody in the world has waste like ours,” says one of my guides as we enter the site. No one has so much strontium 90, for instance, which behaves a lot like calcium and lodges inside the bones of any living creatures it penetrates, basically forever. Along with chromium and tritium and carbon tetrachloride and iodine 129 and the other waste products of a plutonium factory it is already present in Hanford’s groundwater. There are other nuclear-waste sites in the United States, but two-thirds of all the waste is here. Beneath Hanford a massive underground glacier of radioactive sludge is moving slowly, but relentlessly, toward the Columbia River.
The place is now an eerie deconstruction site, with ghost towns on top of ghost towns. Much of the old plutonium plant still stands: the husks of the original nine reactors, built in the 1940s, still line the Columbia River, like grain elevators. Their doors have been welded shut, and they have been left to decay—for another century.
Only one stakeholder in the place wanted to know what was going on beneath its soil: the tribes.
WHY THE SCARIEST NUCLEAR THREAT MAY BE COMING FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE, Vanity Fair, BY MICHAEL LEWIS, September 2017“………By the early 1940s the United States government understood that for democracy to survive it needed to beat Hitler to the atom bomb, and that the race had two paths—one required enriched uranium, the other plutonium. In early 1943, the United States Army was evicting everyone from an area in Eastern Washington nearly half the size of Rhode Island and setting out to create plutonium in order to build a nuclear bomb. The site of Hanford was chosen for its proximity to the Columbia River, which could supply the cooling water while its dams provided the electricity needed to make plutonium. Hanford was also chosen for its remoteness: the army was worried about both enemy attacks and an accidental nuclear explosion. Hanford was, finally, chosen for its poverty. It was convenient that what would become the world’s largest public-works project arose in a place from which people had to be paid so little to leave.
From 1943 until 1987, as the Cold War was ending and Hanford closed its reactors, the place created two-thirds of the plutonium in the United States’ arsenal—a total of 70,000 nuclear weapons since 1945. You’d like to think that if anyone had known the environmental consequences of plutonium, or if anyone could have been certain that the uranium bomb would work, they’d never have done here what they did. “Plutonium is hard to produce,” said MacWilliams. “And hard to get rid of.” By the late 1980s the state of Washington had gained some clarity on just how hard and began to negotiate with the U.S. government. In the ensuing agreement the United States promised to return Hanford to a condition where, as MacWilliams put it, “kids can eat the dirt.” When I asked him to guess what it would cost to return Hanford to the standards now legally required, he said, “A century and a hundred billion dollars.” And that was a conservative estimate.
More or less overnight Hanford went from the business of making plutonium to the even more lucrative business of cleaning it up. In its last years of production the plutonium plant employed around 9,000 people. It still employs 9,000 people and pays them even more than it used to. “It’s a good thing that we live in a country that cares enough to take the time it will take, and spend the money it will spend, to clean up the legacy of the Cold War,” said MacWilliams. “In Russia they just drop concrete on the stuff and move on.”
The Department of Energy wires 10 percent of its annual budget, or $3 billion a year, into this tiny place and intends to do so until the radioactive mess is cleaned up. And even though what is now called the Tri-Cities area is well populated and amazingly prosperous—yachts on the river, $300 bottles of wine in the bistros—the absolute worst thing that could happen to it is probably not a nuclear accident. The worst thing that could happen is that the federal government loses interest in it and slashes the D.O.E.’s budget—as President Trump has proposed to do. And yet Trump won the county in which Hanford resides by 25 points. Continue reading →
Aboard the NS Savannah, America’s first (and last) nuclear merchant ship, Years after shutdown, Savannah still waits for funding for its reactor decommissioning. Ars Technica, SEAN GALLAGHER – 7/26/2017 Constructed at a cost of $46.9 million ($386.8 million in 2016 dollars) and launched on July 21, 1959, the Savannah was the world’s first nuclear cargo ship and the second nuclear-powered civilian ship (coming just two years after the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Lenin). Owned by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) and operated by commercial cargo companies, for nearly a decade she carried cargo and passengers around the world. She also acted as a floating herald for America’s seemingly inevitable, cool Atomic Age future. Savannah boasted all the latest conveniences, including one of the world’s first microwave ovens.
Many critics have since called the Savannah an expensive Cold War-era.boondoggle,………Ultimately, the bright atomic future Savannah was supposed to herald quickly lost its luster. The $2 million in annual subsidies required to operate made her a target for budget cuts—especially when the price of oil was low. In 1971, she was taken out of service. By the 1980s, both Japan and Germany abandoned their own nuclear merchant programs; only Russia still operates nuclear-powered merchant ships from its Arctic port in Murmansk. The country has a lone nuclear icebreaking cargo ship and six icebreakers in service…….
So more than 45 years after her last voyage, the Savannah remains moored here at the Canton Marine Terminal in a sort of limbo. It has been defueled and had nearly all of its radioactive materials removed, but the Savannah‘s reactor is still intact—as is the ship’s license to operate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)……
the ship is also still regulated by the NRC and awaiting congressional funding for full decommissioning. It’s a step that the US government didn’t really even think about back when Savannah was built……. t the ship is also still regulated by the NRC and awaiting congressional funding for full decommissioning. It’s a step that the US government didn’t really even think about back when
Citizens ask about spent nuclear fuel storage, closure of Palisades, Kalamazoo News 27 July 17 By Brad Devereaux bdeverea@mlive.com SOUTH HAVEN, MI — Inspectors and experts on radioactive material and decommissioning nuclear power plants spoke with the public during an open house about Palisades Nuclear Plant.
While the plant is slated to be shut down in October 2018, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will remain involved to oversee safety compliance as the reactor fuel is removed and the plant enters decommissioning.
During a July 26 meeting in South Haven, citizens asked NRC officials about the clean-up and expressed concerns about the process to shutter the facility.
Benton Harbor resident Bette Pierman said she wanted answers from the NRC about what the site would be like for future generations. She wanted to know if any radioactive materials would be transported off-site during decommissioning, and said she worries the infrastructure is not in place to transport radioactive materials…….
Corinne Carey of Grand Rapids sat in the front row during some of the presentations by NRC officials, recording on a video camera. She said the plant should have been closed “a long time ago,” and now she’s concerned about the details of the clean-up and wants to make sure it’s done right.
“Who knows what’s going to happen to it? Is the radioactive waste going to remain on site?” she said.
She worries that a plane could hit a site where spent nuclear fuel is to be stored.
“What is the world we’re turning over to (our grandchildren)?” she said.
Decommissioning experts spoke about the process that can take up to 60 years that involves removing radioactive material and cleaning materials at the site and putting spent fuel into safe storage……..
Security measures will remain in place as long as spent fuel is stored on the site, the NRC said. The spent fuel is in a different category than other radioactive materials found on site, and will not decay to a safe level in the near future.
Fall Film Festival includes Documentary on St. Louis Nuclear Waste Site and Landfill Fire, Huntington News, July 23, 2017 BY TONY RUTHERFORD , HNN ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR “……….The Fall International Film Festival includes a not yet shown HBO documentary, “Atomic Homefront,” which details the anguish of confronting state and federal agencies over nuclear waste dumping in St. Louis. The film is by Sarah Spurlock, wife of Morgan Spurlock.
HBO documentary, “Atomic Homefront” at St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase
Left unsaid, both the NY Times , Wall Street Journal, and HNN have revealed that Huntington , too, had a uranium and nickel carbonyl plant that processed and recycled fuels for three gaseous diffusion plants. When the process was found to not be cost effective, the structure — owned by the Atomic Energy Commission — was dismantled and the most contaminated portions buried in Piketon,Ohio. Workers from the Huntington Pilot Plant have received compensation from the Dept. of Labor for working in a facility covered under the Atomic Energy Commission definition that includes the St. Louis site, Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Piketon, Ohio.
According to IMDB, “Atomic Homefront” reveals :
“… St. Louis, Missouri’s atomic past as a uranium processing center for the Atomic bomb and the governmental and corporate negligence that lead to the illegal dumping of Manhattan Project radioactive waste throughout North County neighborhoods. Our film is a case study of how citizens are confronting state and federal agencies for the truth about the extent of the contamination and are fighting to keep their families safe. ”
Film International published the following review of Oscar winning director’s Rebecca Cammisa reviewed at the AFI film festival:
f you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the systemworks. As a study in government failure and corporate greed, this HBO-supported documentary from director Rebecca Cammisa shows that your trust is grievously and tragically misplaced if you expect the Environmental Protection Agency to serve a desperate public. Likewise, if you believe a large waste service company would provide honest guidance and responsibility in serving its customers, think again.
This passionate film, having its world premiere as one of the 11 Spotlight Screenings at AFI DOCS in Washington DC, is a heart breaker. Cammisa, an Oscar nominee for her 2009 documentary feature Which Way Home (dealing with child migrants) and her 2012 short God Is the Bigger Elvis (a lovely look at Dolores Hart, a Hollywood actress turned nun), spent several years following the problems of two St. Louis neighborhoods that have seen their residents ravaged by cancer and death. http://www.huntingtonnews.net/150485
BRUSSELS CALLS FOR CZECH STRATEGY FOR RADIOACTIVE WASTE, Radio Prague, Chris Johnstone 24-07-2017 Czech measures to deal with its nuclear waste backlog are again under scrutiny as the country faces possible European Commission sanctions for failing to pass on its domestic plans for dealing with nuclear waste from power plants and other civil activities and an update of the existing strategy taking place.
Czech plans for dealing with nuclear waste have been put under the spotlight once again thanks to a European Commission warning calling for the country to outline its plans for deal with nuclear waste. The Czech Republic was last week one of five states which the Commission said had failed to pass on their long-term nuclear waste plans by the original deadline of August 2015. The other countries include, somewhat ironically, largely non-nuclear Austria, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.
The Czech Republic has around 10,000 tonnes of high radioactive nuclear waste, mostly stemming from the spent fuel of its nuclear power plants which begin operating in the mid-1980s, but also from other civil activities. The spent fuel is stored on site at nuclear power plants but the barrels containing it will wear out long before the contents become safe…….http://www.radio.cz/en/section/business/brussels-calls-for-czech-strategy-for-radioactive-waste
The reports don’t acknowledge these stories, these illnesses, those who are dying or dead. Most residents of St. Louis—including and especially the residents of predominantly African-American neighborhoods—don’t even know the contamination is there. …….
the half-life of Thorium 232: fourteen billion years, a half-life so long that by the time this element is safe for human exposure
a contradiction I can’t resolve: that the massive crime here began with a belief in a kind of care, a belief that protection comes only in the form of wars and bombs, and that its ultimate expression is a technology that can destroy in a single instant any threat to our safety with perfect precision and efficiency. But hundreds of thousands lost their lives to those bombs in Japan, and the fallout from building them has claimed at least as many lives right here at home.
The Fallout, In St. Louis, America’s nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies. Guernica, By Lacy M. Johnson, 10 July 2017 “………Months ago, when a high-school friend reached out to me asking that I give my attention to this story, she told me that a company tasked decades ago with disposing of nuclear waste for the federal government had instead dumped thousands of barrels of the waste somewhere in North St. Louis County. The barrels were left exposed to the elements for decades, and the waste had leaked into the ground and into the water of a nearby creek……
When the federal government filed suit to acquire the property under eminent domain, officials refused to disclose the exact nature of the waste “for security reasons.” They assured the local government that the waste they’d be storing there wasn’t dangerous. They shook hands and signed papers. They looked people squarely in the eye.
During the next twenty years, truckload by truckload, the green patchwork of farm fields by the airfield turned into a foreign world. Mountains of raffinate rose up across from row after row of rusty black drums, stacked two or three high.
……..The reports tell only so much, only certain parts of certain versions of the story. The rest I have to piece together using articles in the local newspaper, phone calls with these residents, oral histories collected by others, newsletters from various companies celebrating one anniversary or another…..
In my pile of reports there is a series of letters from Cotter to the Atomic Energy Commission, in which Cotter tries to convince the government to take these wastes back. Commercial disposal would cost upwards of two million dollars (about twelve million dollars today). They couldn’t afford it. They knew that the AEC was using a quarry at the recently decommissioned second Mallinckrodt facility at Weldon Spring, roughly twenty miles southwest of the airport, as a dump for nuclear waste. They asked the AEC if they could use it, asked for guidance, and for help.
That help never came……
A lengthy investigation discovered that from August to October 1973, a private construction firm drove truckloads of the leached barium sulfate—along with roughly forty thousand tons of soil removed from the top eighteen inches of the Latty Avenue site—to West Lake Landfill, all around the clock, sometimes in the middle of the night. To the landfill operator it looked like dirt, so he waved the trucks in and charged them nothing, using it as landfill cover over the municipal refuse…..
the reports express the detection of this contamination in charts, as numbers and statistics. They’ve found contamination at the airport, in the drainage ditches leading away from the airport, and all along the creek—along the trucking routes, in ballfields and in parks and gardens and backyards, in driveways, in people’s basements and under their kitchen cabinets. Even now, as I write this, they are still trying to figure out just how far it has spread.
The reports measure the health risk of exposure to this contamination as an equation, with a threshold of acceptable risk. But what the reports don’t say is that the contamination has already done so much damage that cannot be measured or undone. The Mallinckrodt uranium workers are some of the most contaminated in the history of the atomic age. So contaminated, in fact, that in 2009 all former Mallinckrodt uranium workers were added as a “special exposure cohort” to the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The act provides compensation and lifetime medical benefits to employees who became ill with any of twenty-two named cancers as a result of working in the nuclear-weapons industry. Because of this special cohort status, if a former Mallinckrodt worker develops any of these named illnesses, exposure to the uranium is assumed. But the people who live near the creek didn’t work for Mallinckrodt. They aren’t entitled to compensation or to medical benefits.
A woman named Mary Oscko, for instance, has lived her whole life in North St. Louis County, most of it near that small creek. Now she is dying of stage-four lung cancer, though she has never smoked a day in her life. Shari Riley, a nurse who lived near the creek, died recently of appendix cancer—rare in the general population, but several dozen cases have been reported among those who live or lived near the airport or along the creek. My friend—the one who contacted me about this story—never lived in St. Louis, but her mother grew up two houses away from that creek. My friend suspects that her mother’s exposure to the contamination as a child changed her DNA in ways she passed on to her children, which would explain why my friend was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a few years ago, at the age of thirty-five. Could it also explain why my friend’s mother once gave birth to a set of conjoined twins? Conjoined twins are an anomaly in the general population, but these make the fourth set born to women who grew up near that creek. And those are just the ones we know about.
The reports don’t acknowledge these stories, these illnesses, those who are dying or dead. Most residents of St. Louis—including and especially the residents of predominantly African-American neighborhoods—don’t even know the contamination is there. …….
“My librarian,” Kay Drey tells me—has filed the EPA’s Record of Decision for the West Lake Landfill, and then on the drawer where I might find studies that contradict the EPA’s assessment that the radioactive waste in the landfill doesn’t pose a threat to residents—the radiological surveys of the site conducted in the 1970s and 1980s by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, as well as more current studies by independent researchers. She explains that the radioactive waste buried in West Lake Landfill covers about twenty acres in two locations in one or many layers, estimated at two to fifteen feet thick, some of it mixed in with municipal refuse and some of it sitting right at the surface. It is in the trees surrounding the landfill and the vacuum bags in nearby homes. This waste contains not only uranium, but also thorium and radium, all long-lived, highly radio-toxic elements. And because Mallinckrodt removed most of the naturally occurring uranium from this ore, the Cotter Corporation, in effect, created an enriched thorium deposit when they dumped the residues at West Lake Landfill. “In fact,” Kay muses, “West Lake Landfill might now be the richest deposit of thorium in the world.”
Thorium and uranium in particular are among the radioactive primordial nuclides, radioactive elements that have existed in their current form since before Earth was formed, since before the formation of the solar system even, and will remain radioactive and toxic to life long after humans are gone. We’re sitting back in Kay’s dining room when she pulls out a tiny booklet labeled “Nuclear Wallet Cards.” What its intended purpose is, I don’t know, but Kay flips to the back to show me the half-life of Thorium 232: fourteen billion years, a half-life so long that by the time this element is safe for human exposure, the Appalachian Mountains will have eroded away, every ocean on Earth’s surface will have evaporated, Antarctica will be free of ice, and all the rings of Saturn will have decayed. Earth’s rotation will have slowed so much that days will have become twenty-five hours long, photosynthesis will have ceased, and multicellular life will have become a physical impossibility.
“You know, tritium is my favorite,” Kay tells me before I leave. It’s produced as a side effect of operating nuclear reactors and released into the air, or leaks into the waterways; it contaminates the water supply and condenses in our food. One official who worked at the nuclear reactor Kay had tried to prevent once told her that tritium was no big deal. “It only destroys DNA molecules.” A few years ago they found tritium in the groundwater in Callaway County. “There is no way to remove it,” she says…..
….the Weldon Spring site. After it was decommissioned, the plant—a second one run by Mallinckrodt—was found to be so contaminated that the Department of Energy eventually entombed the whole site in layers upon layers of clay and soil, gravel, engineered filters and limestone rocks, creating a mountain covering forty-five acres, containing approximately 1.5 million cubic yards of hazardous waste. With its own educational center located near the base, the containment dome has become a kind of memorial for a tragedy that hasn’t finished happening. The top of the dome is the highest point in the county.
“Oh, you don’t want to go there anyway,” Kay says, waving the idea away with her slender hand. “It’s leaking.”……..
a contradiction I can’t resolve: that the massive crime here began with a belief in a kind of care, a belief that protection comes only in the form of wars and bombs, and that its ultimate expression is a technology that can destroy in a single instant any threat to our safety with perfect precision and efficiency. But hundreds of thousands lost their lives to those bombs in Japan, and the fallout from building them has claimed at least as many lives right here at home.
There is no one to arrest for this, to send to jail, to fine or execute or drag to his humiliation in the city square. Even if Karen and Dawn win their fight and convince the government to remove every gram of radioactive waste in the landfill and the creek and the airport and the backyards and gardens here, people will still be sick. Thousands of them. Chronic exposure to radiation has changed their DNA, and they’ll likely pass those changes on to their children, and to their children’s children, and on and on through every generation. In this regard, no one is immune……..
The EPA Region 7 offices are located in a sprawling modern government building in a suburb of Kansas City. The small conference room just to the side of the main entrance is filled with a surprising number of people……
During our too-short conversation I learn that the EPA has over 1,300 sites in the Superfund program, and Region 7 alone has ninety-eight sites on the National Priorities List. Each of these communities is demanding that their toxic sites be scrubbed clean. ………https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/
nuclear-news 
While the plant is slated to be shut down in October 2018, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will remain involved to oversee safety compliance as the reactor fuel is removed and the plant enters decommissioning.
During a July 26 meeting in South Haven, citizens asked NRC officials about the clean-up and expressed concerns about the process to shutter the facility.
Benton Harbor resident Bette Pierman said she wanted answers from the NRC about what the site would be like for future generations. She wanted to know if any radioactive materials would be transported off-site during decommissioning, and said she worries the infrastructure is not in place to transport radioactive materials…….
Corinne Carey of Grand Rapids sat in the front row during some of the presentations by NRC officials, recording on a video camera. She said the plant should have been closed “a long time ago,” and now she’s concerned about the details of the clean-up and wants to make sure it’s done right.
“Who knows what’s going to happen to it? Is the radioactive waste going to remain on site?” she said.
She worries that a plane could hit a site where spent nuclear fuel is to be stored.
“What is the world we’re turning over to (our grandchildren)?” she said.
Decommissioning experts spoke about the process that can take up to 60 years that involves removing radioactive material and cleaning materials at the site and putting spent fuel into safe storage……..
Security measures will remain in place as long as spent fuel is stored on the site, the NRC said. The spent fuel is in a different category than other radioactive materials found on site, and will not decay to a safe level in the near future.
“The contents inside is extremely radioactive,” Edwards said about spent fuel that is usually stored in a dry cask some time after a plant shutdown. It emits lethal doses if left unshielded……..http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2017/07/citizens_ask_about_radioactivi.html