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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Hanford’s pre-treated nuclear waste might not meet vital plant criteria

Hanford’s underground tanks contain some 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.

Exchange Monitor, By Wayne Barber,

A storage tank spoiled a batch of liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Site that
was thought to be clean enough for disposal, according to a contractor memo
seen by the Exchange Monitor.

The waste from Hanford’s tank farm, part of
a less-radioactive tranche that is supposed to be solidified starting in
2025 by the Bechtel National-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization
Plant, had been scrubbed by the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) outside the
plant and piped into a nearby tank, designated AP-106, for storage.

But recent sampling of TSCR-treated waste stored in AP-106 revealed higher
levels of radioactive contamination than is allowed in the Waste Treatment
and Immobilization Plant during its Direct Feed Low Activity Waste phase,
according to an Oct. 3 memo from the site’s liquid-waste prime
contractor, the Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions.

Hanford’s underground tanks contain some 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons. Production began during the Manhattan Project and ran through much of the Cold War.

The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant as constructed can only solidify a portion of Hanford’s less-radioactive waste, called low-activity waste. DOE has yet to approve a means of solidifying high-level waste or settle on a means of solidifying the low-activity waste that cannot be treated in the existing plant. One option for the later tranche of waste is mixing it with concrete-like grout.

 Exchange Monitor 19th Oct 2023

https://www.exchangemonitor.com/hanfords-pre-treated-waste-might-not-meet-vit-plant-criteria/ #nuclear #antinuclear #NoNukes #radiation

October 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Fate of Indian Point #Nuclear Wastewater Still Unclear

The Highlands Current, By Brian PJ Cronin, Reporter | September 29, 2023  #antinuclear #nuclear-free #NoNukes

Holtec considering ‘multiple options’ but won’t say more

A month after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill preventing Holtec from discharging water from Indian Point’s spent fuel pools into the Hudson River, the company said it hasn’t yet decided what it will do with the waste.

At the Sept. 21 meeting of the Indian Point Decommissioning Oversight Board, a representative for Holtec, which is decommissioning the plant on the Hudson River near Peekskill, said he was not going to discuss what options it was considering. But he did say it expects the process will take longer.

“There will be a schedule impact; I don’t think you can avoid it,” said Rich Burroni, who was attending his last oversight meeting because he was recently promoted to become Holtec’s chief nuclear officer.

No remaining options are without their opponents. Boiling the water so that it evaporates would transfer its radiation to the air. Dumping it in the ocean would violate international law. Mixing it with concrete and shipping it to the western U.S. to be buried, which other decommissioned plants have done, has been criticized as an environmental justice violation, since it passes the risks to another community………………………………………………………………………………………

Dave Lochbaum, the oversight board’s nuclear expert, noted that in 2009 a tank at Indian Point failed, leaking 10,000 gallons a day “for a while” until the leak was discovered. “The result of that is the contamination gets into places it shouldn’t be, in higher levels of contamination,” he said.

When asked why the tanks fail so often, Lochbaum said that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) policies don’t encourage the development of better tanks.

“If you’ve ever paid a nickel for an overdue library book, you’ve paid a nickel more than the NRC has ever fined anyone for spilling millions of gallons of contaminated water,” he said. “Because there’s no sanction for doing wrong, there’s no incentive for getting it right.”

Lochbaum also had harsh words for the NRC when making a presentation on how the dry casks that store the spent fuel itself are inspected. Almost all of Indian Point’s spent nuclear fuel has been loaded into metal canisters, which are lowered into concrete hulls to protect them until they can be shipped to a yet-to-be-built permanent facility. The casks are supposed to be inspected on a regular basis to make sure they aren’t leaking or in danger of cracking.

But an audit by the NRC released this year found that for the past 20 years, nuclear power plants in the Southeast weren’t being inspected nearly as often or as robustly as they should have been. And inspectors weren’t qualified. Lochbaum said that in some cases, the inspectors didn’t even enter the fenced areas where the dry casks were located.

“They walked around the outside of the fence,” Lochbaum said. “That’s probably not adequate inspections.”

He also took issue with the fact that the NRC only spot-checks casks, rather than inspecting them all. At the same time, inspecting all of the casks properly is impractical because the process exposes inspectors to a low dose of radiation.

Public records indicate that the casks at Indian Point have been inspected more often and more thoroughly than those in the Southeast, but Lochbaum said that it’s still not clear if the inspectors are qualified or how many hours were spent.

The oversight board has asked the NRC for more detailed information on the inspection process at Indian Point, and expects to have answers in time for its next public meeting on Dec. 6.  https://highlandscurrent.org/2023/09/29/fate-of-indian-point-wastewater-still-unclear/?fbclid=IwAR0Qd18gKvQAQcMkvF9g6si1l5b3OlNV5oHaOo-t7r3df8FVVXPf8SaqfXQ

October 3, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes | 1 Comment