Scientists, city leaders, local community warn against burial of nuclear waste near San Onofre State Beach.
Local Leaders, Scientists Sounding Alarm Over Possible Nuclear Disaster In Southland http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/06/08/local-leaders-scientists-sounding-alarm-over-planned-nuclear-waste-dumping-in-san-onofre-state-beach/ June 8, 2016 LAGUNA BEACH (CBSLA.com) — A standing-room-only public forum was held Wednesday night to warn the community about Southern California Edison’s plans to bury radioactive waste near San Onofre State Beach.
If nothing is done, the utility will be allowed to bury 2,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in canister less than an inch thick 100 feet from the beach, according to the newly formed Secure Nuclear Waste Coalition, made up of scientists, city leaders and people who live near the San Onofre nuclear plant.
“Each canister contains a Chernobyl’s worth of radiation, and there’s 50 of them. And they want to put 100 more without dealing with the fact that ocean air is going to cause them to crack and potentially and even explode,” Donna Gilmore said.
The California Coastal Commission approved the beachfront nuclear waste burial on October 6, 2015.
The group told those living within the 50-mile evacuation zone from San Diego to Long Beach that even though the San Onofre nuclear- generating station has been shut down, the real danger still lies in the still highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel that will remain on site for years.
“They have been called rightfully so – bombs in our backyard,” warned Rita Conn of the coalition.
Edison has maintained the shuttered nuclear power plant and the spent fuel rods stored there are safe. But some fear Southern California is one earthquake, one tsunami or one terrorist attack away from a nuclear disaster.
“Whether it’s mother nature, human error or terrorism, anything could close down the 7th largest economy of the United States for the next 10,000 years,” Laguna Beach resident Marni Magda said.
“If we don’t do anything about it, people are just going to have their heads in the sand and heaven forbid, something terrible happens,” Donna Tiab warned.
A call to Southern California Edison for comment Wednesday night was not returned.
World’s costliest nuclear tomb in Finland
Finland to bury nuclear waste for 100,000 years in world’s costliest tomb ABC News 7 June 16 Deep underground on a lush green island, Finland is preparing to bury its highly-radioactive nuclear waste for 100,000 years — sealing it up and maybe even throwing away the key.
Tiny Olkiluoto island, off Finland’s west coast, will become home to the world’s costliest and longest-lasting burial ground, a network of tunnels called Onkalo — Finnish for “The Hollow”.
Countries have been wrestling with what to do with nuclear power’s dangerous by-products since the first plants were built in the 1950s.
Most nations keep the waste above ground in temporary storage facilities, but Onkalo is the first attempt to bury it for good.
Starting in 2020, Finland plans to stow around 5,000 tonnes of nuclear waste in the tunnels, more than 420 metres below the Earth’s surface.
Already home to one of Finland’s two nuclear power plants, Olkiluoto is now the site of a tunnelling project set to cost up to 3.5 billion euros ($5.3 billion) to build and operate until the 2120s, when the vaults will be sealed for good……
At present, Onkalo consists of a twisting five-kilometre tunnel with three shafts for staff and ventilation. Eventually the nuclear warren will stretch 42 kilometres….
Spent nuclear rods will be placed in iron casts, then sealed into thick copper canisters and lowered into the tunnels.
Each capsule will be surrounded with a buffer made of bentonite, a type of clay that will protect them from any shuddering in the surrounding rock and help stop water from seeping in.
Clay blocks and more bentonite will fill the tunnels before they are sealed up.
The method was developed in Sweden where a similar project is under way, and Posiva insists it is safe.
But opponents of nuclear power, such as Greenpeace, have raised concern about potential radioactive leaks.
“Nuclear waste has already been created and therefore something has to be done about it,” said the environmental group’s Finnish spokesman Juha Aromaa.
“But certain unsolved risk factors need to be investigated further.”
Looking 100,000 years into the future
Environmental groups are questioning the risks of the ambitious nuclear waste storage plan
Planning the nuclear graveyard involves asking the impossible — how can we know what this little island will be like in 100,000 years? And who will be living there?
To put the timeframe into perspective: 100,000 years ago Finland was partly covered by ice, Neanderthals were roaming Europe and Homo Sapiens were starting to move from Africa to the Middle East……..http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-08/finns-to-bury-nuclear-waste-in-world’s-costliest-tomb/7488588
Lack of trust in USA govt’s plans for nuclear waste storage
“You would probably need a referendum where citizens can actually vote to embrace a repository in their community,” Raab said. “The vote would have to be closer to 100 percent than a simple majority.”
Nuclear waste storage plan a matter of trust http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20160606/NEWS/160609636
BOSTON — Can federal energy officials be trusted to put together an interim storage plan for nuclear waste that provides adequate protection for the population and the environment?
That question was repeatedly asked by those who attended last week’s Boston forum organized by the Department of Energy to get public input on its plan for “consent-based siting” of facilities to temporarily store the 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors until a permanent repository is built.
Community group to fight San Onofre nuclear waste plan
Group forms to fight San Onofre nuclear waste plan, San Diego Union Tribune By Jeff McDonald June 2, 2016 Residents of San Diego and Orange counties concerned about the longterm storage of radioactive waste on the coast between Oceanside and San Clemente have organized a new coalition aimed at forcing the removal of tons of spent nuclear fuel.
The group, calling itself Secure Nuclear Waste, is comprised of lawyers, activists, a scientist, an elected official and an emergency-room physician. It is hosting a community meeting at Laguna Beach City Hall next Wednesday evening.
“The deadly radioactive waste is toxic to humans for millions of years,” the group said in a news release criticizing a California Coastal Commission storage permit approved in October. “If nothing is done, the waste could be buried on the beach as early as May 2017 for up to 300 years.”
Secure Nuclear Waste said it organized as a counter to the Community Engagement Panel, a group of volunteers convened by plant owner Southern California Edison to meet regularly and discuss decommissioning of the failed San Onofre nuclear plant.
Members of Secure Nuclear Waste include San Diego consumer attorneys Michael Aguirre and Maria Severson. It also includes Charles Langley of the consumer group Public Watchdog, geologist Robert Pope and transportation consultant Nina Babiarz.
San Juan Capistrano Mayor Pam Patterson, who serves on the Community Engagement Panel due to her elected office, also joined Secure Nuclear Waste. She said the official group is not independent and not forceful enough opposing onsite spent-fuel storage at San Onofre.
“People on the Community Engagement Panel have been hand-picked because they are candy-coating the situation,” Patterson said. “The community needs to understand what’s going on is not in anybody’s best interest. It’s scary what they are doing.”
The Coastal Commission permit, now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Aguirre & Severson law firm, allows Edison to store 1,600 tons of spent fuel in underground canisters just north of the shuttered nuclear reactors.
The spent fuel historically has been stored in above-ground cooling ponds but Edison is in the process of transferring the waste into steel-lined casks. More than 100 of the 45-ton canisters will then be buried in a massive tomb embedded in the beach.
Critics say the plan does not allow for monitoring the canisters for future degradation or leaks and presents a health threat to the millions of people who live and travel through the region. They say regulators should do a better job mitigating the longterm threat.
“It is an outrage that taxpayers are funding politically appointed bureaucrats at state agencies to create a deadly toxic waste landfill next to an interstate highway and the Los Angeles-San Diego coastal rail corridor,” said Babiarz, the transportation consultant and coalition member. “Our two counties have united to fight this threat to public safety.”……
The first Secure Nuclear Waste meeting convenes Wednesday, June 8 at 6 p.m. at Laguna Beach City Hall, 505 Forest Ave.
The Community Engagement Panel next meets June 22, when a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expert will discuss so-called consolidated interim storage, the practice or temporarily storing radioactive waste on site until a more permanent federal site is identified. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/jun/02/secure-nuclear-waste/
Los Alamos National Laboratory waste cleanup costs rocket to $4 billion
Environment Department: LANL cleanup could cost $4B, Santa Fe New Mexican News Jun 2, 2016. Rebecca Moss The New Mexican
The New Mexico Environment Department told state lawmakers Wednesday that it may cost the federal government far more than expected to remove contamination from Los Alamos National Laboratory over the next decade.
During a meeting of the legislative Radioactive and Hazardous Waste Committee, Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said costs could exceed $4 billion, more than double the current budget proposed by federal regulators.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1.7 billion, 10-year Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract, work primarily focused on cleaning up contamination and legacy nuclear waste at lab sites and areas surrounding the lab. The announcement follows the release of a new consent order with the state in March, a document that governs the lab’s cleanup objectives. Unlike the previous order, with a missed deadline in December 2015 to have all waste removed from the lab, the new deal focuses on contamination and sets more flexible targets, which Flynn has said will accelerate cleanup.
The December deadline was missed in large part because of a radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico, where barrels of transuranic waste from Los Alamos were being stored in underground salt caverns. An improperly packaged waste drum from Los Alamos burst in February 2014, closing down the waste site.
Following the WIPP breach, the consortium that operates the lab, Los Alamos National Security LLC, received a scathing performance review, and in December, federal officials announced the management contract would be put up for bid. A new contractor will take over lab operations in 2018…….
Some critics, however, have said that having flexible deadlines for cleanup work is not an effective way to hold the lab accountable.
In April, Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Los Alamos National Security and the Department of Energy over their failures to meet cleanup milestones under the 2005 consent order. The watchdog group said the state could have collected more than $300 million in penalties if the federal government was held accountable for the deadlines.
The state issued 150 extensions under the Martinez administration, which the lab still failed to meet, the group said.
Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan said in a news release at the time that the group was aiming to make the lab and federal agency “clean up their radioactive and toxic mess first before making another one for a nuclear weapons stockpile that is already bloated far beyond what we need.”
He was referring to plans pending in Congress to increase plutonium pit production in Los Alamos over the coming decades.
“I don’t believe there is a sincere intention on the part of anyone, including the New Mexico Environment Department, to clean up this site,” said Greg Mello, director of the Las Alamos Study Group, another local nuclear watchdog group.
Mello said putting more money into cleanup work won’t remedy the lab’s waste problem, with a new waste stream resulting from continued nuclear weapons work at the lab.
“Just to say that we need more money every year? There is no end, this goes on forever,” he said. “It’s time we close down production.” http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/environment-department-lanl-cleanup-could-cost-b/article_be41efe6-40a5-53c4-af82-b101012c2418.html?utm_content=buffer7c192&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
“Just Mums” have become a powerful lobbying force for action on radioactive wastes.
Just moms” have become a surprisingly powerful force, successfully lobbying the state health department to challenge some of the federal government’s findings that downplayed the site’s risks,
Just Moms continue to rally the public to demand tests from the state. The women also took trips, uninvited, to the state offices and asked for meetings so they explain why they believed the nuclear waste posed a threat. The aggressive community lobbying appeared to pay off: the state health department agreed to test the site for evidence that the radioactive waste has spread, and late last year, the Missouri State Attorney general finally released the findings. Among the disturbing conclusions: possible radioactive waste has in fact been found “off site” in the nearby foliage. What’s more, groundwater wells outside the perimeter of the landfill were found to be contaminated with carcinogens like benzene in “high concentrations,” the state said
Community reacts to STL County’s emergency plan for looming #WestLakeLandfill disaster
Community reacts to STL County’s emergency plan for looming #WestLakeLandfill disaster Two Stay-at-Home Moms Are Waging War Against the Feds Over Illegal Toxic Waste Broadly, by Amy Martyn JUN 1 2016 https://twitter.com/justmomsstl
What do you do when there’s 10,000 barrels of illegally dumped uranium two miles away from your home and the government tells you not to worry about it?
Dawn Chapman and her family are stuck in an absurd and depressing situation: Less than two miles from the Chapmans’ neighborhood in Bridgeton, Missouri, sits a landfill where radioactive uranium was illegally dumped by a government contractor forty years ago. Since the Environmental Protection Agency is not required to warn people of such things, most people in the area—including many elected officials—knew nothing about the dump for decades.
“It would be great to be able to leave this area, but we couldn’t honestly sell our house right now, ” Chapman says. “Even ethically, with what’s going on, I wouldn’t want to sell my house to another family.”
Karen Nickel learned about the dump site during a town hall with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps have successfully removed illegally dumped nuclear waste from other sites across the nation but because this particular site, West Lake Landfill, is under the control of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Corps does not have the authority or funding to conduct a clean-up here. Nickel and other mothers are fearful about what health problem such close proximity to radioactive waste could cause their children. “A lot of their children are coming forward with cancers and such, a couple of my daughter’s friends have brain tumors,” Nickel says……
In the past four years, the “Just moms” have become a surprisingly powerful force, successfully lobbying the state health department to challenge some of the federal government’s findings that downplayed the site’s risks, revealing possible inconsistencies in public statements made by the EPA, and pissing off both the EPA and landfill operator Republic Services. Ed Smith, the policy director for the non-profit Missouri Coalition for the Environment is an admirer of the women. “There’s a lot those moms have done that wouldn’t have been done otherwise,” he says.
The first major success for Just Moms came when Karen and Dawn sniffed a foul odor in their neighborhood. The landfill owners told them that it was due to a “smoldering event,” created by underground gasses that can ignite some of the landfill garbage. The landfill, the moms were told, was in it’s third year of a sustained underground trash smolder, something that’s common among underground landfills—but landfills are typically not next to tons of uranium. Nevertheless, officials assured the moms that a limestone wall between the uranium and the trash would keep the fire from reaching the toxic materials. There were two landfills, the operators insisted: one for nuclear waste, one for trash……….
Chapman and Nickel countered the paid lobbyists with their own attack. For one week in 2014, they focused their sites on United States Congressman Roy Blunt, their federal representative who had previously been publicly silent about the landfill. From their Facebook page:
“EVERY DAY from 8am-4pm please call his WASHINGTON DC office. Make it a part of your daily routine!!!!,” the moms urged supporters in an online post. “Emails are good, but 2,000 phone calls everyday will make a bigger impact!!!”
The effort worked……..
Just Moms continue to rally the public to demand tests from the state. The women also took trips, uninvited, to the state offices and asked for meetings so they explain why they believed the nuclear waste posed a threat. The aggressive community lobbying appeared to pay off: the state health department agreed to test the site for evidence that the radioactive waste has spread, and late last year, the Missouri State Attorney general finally released the findings. Among the disturbing conclusions: possible radioactive waste has in fact been found “off site” in the nearby foliage. What’s more, groundwater wells outside the perimeter of the landfill were found to be contaminated with carcinogens like benzene in “high concentrations,” the state said…….. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/two-stay-at-home-moms-are-waging-war-against-the-feds-over-illegal-toxic-waste
America’s risks of catastrophic fire in spent nuclear fuel pools
Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima, Science, By Richard Stone May. 24, 2016 A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event.
A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.
The revelations come on the heels of a report last week from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the aftermath of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. The report details how a spent fuel fire at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that was crippled by the twin disasters could have released far more radioactivity into the environment.
The nuclear fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors melted down and released radioactive plumes that contaminated land downwind. Japan declared 1100 square kilometers uninhabitable and relocated 88,000 people. (Almost as many left voluntarily.) After the meltdowns, officials feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. By a stroke of luck, that did not happen.
But the national academies’s report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. After fuel is removed from a reactor core, the radioactive fission products continue to decay, generating heat. All nuclear power plants store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 4 years while it slowly cools. To keep it safe, the academies report recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. The panel also says plants should be ready to tighten security after a disaster.
At most U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel is densely packed in pools, heightening the fire risk. NRC has estimated that a major fire at the spent fuel pool at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania would displace an estimated 3.46 million people from 31,000 square kilometers of contaminated land, an area larger than New Jersey. But Von Hippel and Schoeppner think that NRC has grossly underestimated the scale and societal costs of such a fire…….http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/spent-fuel-fire-us-soil-could-dwarf-impact-fukushima
Californians want to palm off their nuclear waste problem onto Texas
California looks to Texas to solve nuclear waste problem
Dallas company has filed to open nuclear waste dump in West Texas
Californians say proposal is chance to move spent fuel from Rancho Seco, San Onofre plants
Moving radioactive materials out of earthquake zones still won’t happen till 2021
BY MAGGIE YBARRA mybarra@mcclatchydc.com 9 May 16. WASHINGTON
California lawmakers are rallying around a plan to relocate radioactive waste from the state’s shuttered nuclear power plants to a storage site in West Texas after failing to secure enough political support to move that waste to a repository in Nevada.
The Texas site is owned by Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, which submitted a nuclear waste storage proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in April.
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents parts of Orange and San Diego counties, said the proposed Texas site is California’s next best hope for moving high-level radioactive waste from areas vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural disasters………
“Seems like we’re on track to make West Texas the nation’s default nuclear waste dump after the one in Nevada fell through,” said Andrew Wheat, the research director for Texans for Public Justice, an advocacy group that targets what it labels the corrupt influence of corporate money in politics.Even if legislators and government officials do decide to move forward with building a nuclear waste facility in West Texas, it would still be years before Californians would see a reduction in the size of the toxic inventory at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, which was decommissioned in 2013, and the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station in Herald, which was mothballed in 2009.
Waste Control Specialists did not respond to questions about how long it would be before the company would be able to relocate nuclear waste from California to Texas, but The Texas Tribune has reported that waste relocation efforts would not begin until 2021………
Irradiated
The U.S. government has compensated over 52,000 nuclear workers illnesses related to radiation exposure, but the process is complicated. Deaths resulting from exposure while working at the plants and the compensation process for survivors begs the question http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article76532967.html
U.S. would back a rethink of Japan’s plutonium recycling program: White House
KYODO MAY 21, 2016 WASHINGTON – The United States would back a change to Japan’s nuclear fuel reprocessing program because there are concerns it may lead to an increase in its ally’s stockpile of unused plutonium, a senior White House official said. … (registered readers only) http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/21/national/politics-diplomacy/u-s-back-rethink-japans-plutonium-recycling-program-white-house/#.V0I7-zV97Gj
Boston Edison Company, now known as NSTAR Electric Company sues US Dept of Energy
DOE Sued for $40M Over Nuclear Waste Storage, Courthouse News Service By LORRAINE BAILEY CN), 19 May 16 — Blaming the government for not settling on a nuclear-waste storage scheme, a nuclear energy company has filed a federal complaint to recover $40 million.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required the U.S. Department of Energy to accept and dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste by Jan. 31, 1998, in return for fees paid by owners of such waste.
It also effectively made it mandatory for nuclear utilities to enter into contracts for such disposal.
When the Department of Energy failed to meet the 1998 deadline, however, utilities began to incur substantial costs for storage and management of the waste accumulating at reactor sites.
By 2006, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims had found that the Department of Energy partially breached its contractual obligations to Yankee Atomic Electric Co., Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co., and Maine Yankee Atomic Power Co., all of which are now decommissioned, to the tune of $235 million
It sued the U.S. in the Court of Federal Claims Wednesday over its continued obligation to pay for highly reactive waste storage.
Boston Edison says it paid Entergy $40.3 million to cover the cost to store spent nuclear fuel through 2012, the expected decommissioning date for the plant.
That fuel would have been disposed of by the government had it kept its pledge.
But now, Entergy has stated that operations at Pilgrim will continue through 2019, and there is still no government plan for a permanent repository for high level nuclear waste.
Most nuclear power plants continue to keep their reactor waste on-site in steel and concrete casks……. The Department of Energy has expressed the urgency need to find a permanent repository, but the Congress has taken no action since abandoning the Yucca Mountain project.
Boston Energy seeks damages for breach of contract, and breach of the covenant of good faith. http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/05/19/doe-sued-for-40m-over-nuclear-waste-storage.htm
Growing opposition in both Canada and USA to nuclear waste dumping near the Great Lakes
Opposition to the project, though, has swelled. More than 180 county boards, city councils and other local elected bodies near the Great Lakes in both countries have passed proclamations urging a veto of the plan.
Plan to store nuclear waste near Great Lakes proves radioactive, WP By Steve Friess May 16 KINCARDINE, Ontario — If there was an off-key moment during the otherwise flawlessly executed trip to the U.S. Capitol this spring by the new Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, it might have come when he was cornered by Rep. Debbie Dingell.
“We never want to see nuclear waste in the Great Lakes,” the freshman Democrat from Michigan sternly told Trudeau during a visit to the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Continue reading
America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission set to exempt nuclear corporations from safety costs and liabilities
US nuclear industry’s plan thanks to NRC: let taxpayers carry the can for closed power plants, Ecologist Linda Pentz Gunter13th May 2016 With five reactors closed in the last three years, the US nuclear industry is in shutdown mode, writes Linda Pentz Gunter – and that means big spending on decommissioning. But now the nuclear regulator is set to exempt owners from safety and emergency costs at their closed plants – allowing them to walk away from the costs and liabilities, and palm them onto taxpayers.
Aging and dangerous nuclear power plants are closing. This should be cause for celebration. We will all be safer now, right? Well, not exactly.
US nuclear power plant owners are currently pouring resources into efforts to circumvent the already virtually non-existent regulations for the dismantlement and decommissioning of permanently closed nuclear reactors.
And sad to say, many on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the industry’s ever compliant lapdog, are trotting happily by their side.
There is an occasional lone critic. NRC Commissioner Jeff Baran, observed that the“NRC does not currently have regulations specifically tailored for this transition from operations to decommissioning. As a result, licensees with reactors transitioning to decommissioning routinely seek exemptions from many of the regulations applicable to operating reactors.”
The inevitable result is that reactor owners will successfully avoid spending money now on decommissioning as they seek to delay beginning the actual cleanup work for the next half century and maybe longer. Later, when it comes time to finish the job, the owners – and the money – could well be long gone.
US reactor owners rely on ‘decommissioning trust fund’ investments to pay for decommissioning activities. But these are failing to accrue adequate funds to do the job. Many of the trusts are incurring annual losses on their investments.
In fact, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found the NRC’s financing formula for decommissioning trust funds to be fundamentally flawed, resulting in the utilities ability to accrue only 57% to 75% of the needed funds……..http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987679/us_nuclear_industrys_plan_thanks_to_nrc_let_taxpayers_carry_the_can_for_closed_power_plants.html
The options for decommissioning a nuclear plant
US nuclear industry’s plan thanks to NRC: let taxpayers carry the can for closed power plants, Ecologist Linda Pentz Gunter13th May 2016 “…….There are currently three decommissioning options when a reactor closes. They are known by apparent acronyms that are really just capitalized slogans, masking the flaws behind all three.
DECON refers to prompt dismantlement. This sounds promising for all sides, dispensing with the whole decommissioning process and its attendant costs, headaches and liabilities in about 10 years.
In principle DECON is supported by environmental and anti-nuclear groups, but with one giant caveat: the radioactive waste that remains on site after decommissioning of the reactor, must be adequately safeguarded.
Under the current regulatory scheme, the NRC allows the licensee to offload the irradiated nuclear fuel from the spent fuel storage pools into dry storage casks. These are not adequately protected from security threats. Nor is there any contingency to re-contain nuclear waste should it begin leaking from one of these casks.
Current casks designs are qualified for on-site nuclear waste storage for only 20 years and re-certified for four additional cycles. Some of these cask designs have already experienced degradation of protective seals and concrete shielding after less than a decade of use.
Of greatest concern, the casks are situated outside, closely congregated, on open tarmacs raising security concerns for their vulnerability to attack.
Consequently, the anti-nuclear and environmental groups that support DECON insist on the implementation of enhanced security called ‘Hardened On-Site Storage’, or HOSS to minimize these risks.
Rather than storing dozens of vulnerable dry-casks right next to each other in the open air, HOSS better secures the nuclear waste in above-ground individualized casks. These casks are fortified within modules of concentric capped silos of concrete and steel surrounded by earthen mounds.
The HOSS canisters would be dispersed over a wider area than traditional cask storage and would be better positioned to withstand a range and combination of weapons, explosives, and attacks, including anti-tank missiles, aircraft impacts, and car bombs.
Currently, reactor owners are not permitted to spend decommissioning funds on nuclear waste management as part of the DECON process. Nor do utilities want to go to the added expense of HOSS, which is not currently being considered by federal agencies, despite hundreds of petitioning groups and thousands of signatories to make HOSS a nuclear security priority at operating reactors as well as decommissioned sites.
A small number of reactors across the world have already used DECON (but without HOSS.) According to the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, of the nearly 150 nuclear power reactors that have ceased operation worldwide to date, only 16 units have completed the ‘DECON’ decommissioning process with 10 of those units in the United States taking on average 10 years to complete.
What ‘SAFSTOR’ really means: ‘mothball’ and walk away
The second option, euphemistically-named SAFSTOR, or ‘safe store’, allows owners to take up to 60 years from the day the reactor closes to complete decommissioning. This would effectively enable owners to delay the start of decommissioning for 50 years, leaving the reactor and fuel pools mothballed until then and the local communities at risk.
Unsurprisingly, this is the option that is increasingly favored by reactor owners, who are petitioning the NRC for across-the-board cost cutting under SAFSTOR, regardless of the specific conditions of the individual reactor sites.
Entergy Vice President, Michael Twomey, even told Vermont state legislators in reference to the decommissioning of its Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor, that if the process is not complete in 60 years the company is fully within its rights to simply walk away, and if challenged, would litigate. Vermont Yankee closed on December 29, 2014.
The third option is ENTOMB. Without any regulatory guidance or legal framework, it allows utilities to essentially avoid decommissioning altogether. It is the option when no other options exist, as is the case at Chernobyl.
The exploded Chernobyl containment was eventually shrouded in a giant concrete sarcophagus at great expense and resulting in radiological exposure to hundreds of thousands of laborers. That structure is now being encased with a new, high-tech “Arch”, again at vast expense. However, for regular decommissioning activities, ENTOMB should be viewed as a last resort and not as a strategy for escaping liability.
Waste management is nuclear power’s most painful Achilles’ heel
The waste management aspect of the decommissioning process remains the industry’s most painful Achilles’ heel. Despite successfully suing the Department of Energy for failure to remove the waste, as promised, to a final repository site, utilities are seeking to avoid using those funds for waste management.
Instead, utilities are seeking to siphon off decommissioning trust funds to build and manage the necessary on-site Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) to house irradiated fuel from a closed reactor. An ISFSI is not currently considered part of a legitimate decommissioning process covered by the trust fund.
The delays wrought by such wrangling means that irradiated fuel sits in densely packed storage pools inside the reactor – and in the case of the 30 remaining GE Mark I and II reactors in the US, on the roof. (The GE designs are the same as those that melted down and exploded at Fukushima.)
The fuel pools are over-packed because of inadequate existing on-site storage facilities. But delays in offloading them, even while the reactor is still running, never mind when it closes, represent one of the greatest risks to public health, safety and security. A catastrophic fire, aircraft impact or other disaster that released vast amounts of radioactive fallout from the high-density storage pools could contaminate entire regions potentially indefinitely.
“The four ongoing disasters at Fukushima Daiichi have clearly shown the vulnerability of nuclear power plants that have spent nuclear fuel stored in these overcrowded and unprotected spent fuel pools”, Gundersen wrote in his comments to the NRC.
Fuel pools at closed US nuclear plants are a Fukushima waiting to happen
This is the principle reason to oppose SAFSTOR, safety experts say. Not only will the fuel remain in the pools, and in poorly protected waste casks, but protections and safety measures will be reduced. This is already exemplified in Vermont where the NRC has allowed Entergy to dismantle its emergency plan around Vermont Yankee and reduce inspections on the ventilation system near the spent fuel pool.
As Gundersen points out, the Vermont Yankee fuel pool still “contains more highly radioactive waste than was held in any of the fuel pools at Fukushima Daiichi.”
With a Fukushima-scale disaster is a real possibility even at closed reactors, critics are urging the NRC not to rubber stamp exemption requests. In the event of a nuclear catastrophe, evacuations downwind and downstream cannot be assumed to go well if emergency preparedness was discontinued months, years, or even decades earlier.
Even plans for site cleanup and decontamination are inadequate and have been watered down by the NRC itself. Site release criteria currently mandate clearing away surface soil down to three feet. But strontium-90 has been found far deeper on the Vermont Yankee site already. The NRC limit would open the way for strontium and potentially other isotopes resting deeper than three feet to migrate down into groundwater and potentially later to drinking water.
Instead, there should be more thorough post-decommissioning environmental analyses of where and how much residual radioactivity has been left behind in soil and water before power companies are allowed to walk away from accountability and liability.
To do decommissioning right, Gundersen argues that the state ratepayers should control decommissioning funds not the utility, because it is their money.
And, he says, decommissioning should be undertaken in such a way that operators “assure that those plants are promptly and safely decommissioned without unwarranted radiological contamination of the environment and extended cleanup and mitigation costs passed on to ratepayers or taxpayers.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Takoma Park, MD environmental advocacy group. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987679/us_nuclear_industrys_plan_thanks_to_nrc_let_taxpayers_carry_the_can_for_closed_power_plants.html
Fears that South Carolina is to become a nuclear waste import hub
Not only are tons of highly radioactive waste still stored at SRS, the federal government continues to ship nuclear material from foreign nations to the site
Don’t let SRS serve as nuclear dump site, Post & Courier, May 15 2016
The U.S. Department of Energy made some serious promises to South Carolina when it needed a place to bring tons of highly radioactive plutonium back in 2002. And now the DOE wants to renege in nearly every way.
State officials are right to fight it all the way down the line.
Last month, DOE lawyers went to court to insist that the agency isn’t liable for a $100 million penalty owed to South Carolina for the DOE’s failure to remove nuclear waste from Savannah River Site on schedule. The federal agency contends that the agreement with the state was based on goals, not mandates.
The DOE says that its agreement with the state isn’t binding even though it is codified in federal law. In that view, the feds don’t have to pay a penalty for failing to live up to the deal’s requirement to turn weapons grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel or to send the plutonium elsewhere.
No one who observed the intense stand-off between South Carolina and the federal government over its plans to send 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium to Savannah River Site would characterize those requirements as optional.
At the time, state leaders strongly opposed the plan, having reasonably concluded from past experience that the federal government would be more than willing to shift its nuclear waste problems permanently to South Carolina.
At one point, then-Gov. Jim Hodges threatened to stand in the middle of the highway to stop nuclear material from being trucked into South Carolina. He also ordered the S.C. National Guard to close the highways to waste shipments, if necessary.
Those histrionics were intended to underscore the state’s resolve not to willingly permit Savannah River Site to become the nation’s nuclear waste dump.
The crisis passed after the federal government pledged that the nuclear waste would be neutralized and shipped out of state on a firm timetable.
If that agreement allayed the fears of state officials in then, the situation now only intensifies the skepticism by which the DOE’s promises should be viewed in South Carolina.
Not only are tons of highly radioactive waste still stored at SRS, the federal government continues to ship nuclear material from foreign nations to the site…….http://www.postandcourier.com/20160515/160519614/dont-let-srs-serve-as-nuclear-dump-site-
Armenia might have stockpiles of radioactive trash
Armenia may have stockpiles of highly radioactive materials – Ex-CIA analyst http://en.azvision.az/Armenia_may_have_stockpiles_-37406-xeber.html#.VzWPutP6fH8
| Date: 12.05.16, Even talking about nuclear things is dangerously destabilizing, the former analyst at the CIA and the US Department of State, publicist Paul Goble exclusively told Trend May 12.
He was commenting on the statement earlier made by Armenia on possession of a nuclear weapon. “The Soviet Union had so many places where such things were kept that it is unlikely there isn`t some in Armenia,” he said. |
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