How Bedrock Environmental Law Can Break the Nuclear Waste 
Logjam, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/insight-how-bedrock-environmental-law-can-break-the-nuclear-waste-logjam Geoffrey Fettus, NRDC 17 Aug 20
The 30-year battle over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada shows it’s time for the Atomic Energy Act to be amended. Geoffrey Fettus, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says Congress should pass legislation to end the exemption of nuclear waste from hazardous waste and other bedrock environmental laws.
For more than 30 years, Congress and the federal government have tried again and again to shove our nation’s spent nuclear fuel down a hole at Yucca Mountain, Nev. It’s time to use our foundational environmental laws get out of this seemingly impenetrable maze.
Congress should amend the Atomic Energy Act to remove exemptions from environmental laws for radioactive waste, a proposal that got an important boost from the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis as it called for a task force of federal, state, local, and tribal officials to study the implications of this idea.
Earlier this year, President Trump bowed to reality and abandoned efforts to force the radioactive waste on Nevada, the Yucca mirage finally dissipated. What’s clear now is that trying to force Nevada, or Utah, or New Mexico, or Tennessee (or any other state) to take the entirety of the nation’s most toxic nuclear waste won’t work. Continuing down that path will get us nowhere.
Instead of seeing recalcitrant states as the problem, what if we acknowledge the reality that they must be a key part of the solution for nuclear waste?
Feds Have Exclusive Jurisdiction Over Radioactive Materials
Remarkably, our bedrock environmental laws don’t cover nuclear waste, and they should. The Atomic Energy Act started the nuclear industry and was enacted years before our key pollution safeguards were established.
Crucially, and mostly for nuclear weapons reasons, the AEA gave the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over all radioactive materials, including radioactive waste. When Congress enacted our foundational environmental laws decades later, each of them included an exemption that excludes radioactive waste except in limited or marginal ways.
This is the original sin that must be rectified.
To explain this pernicious problem, when Congress considered nuclear waste in its precedent setting 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, it just accepted the AEA’s sole federal authority and nuclear waste’s exclusion from environmental law as the way of the world. Only a few years later, for the sake of political expedience, Congress cut short a well thought out siting process and required the Yucca Mountain repository as the only option.
This was supposed to expedite the process, but not surprisingly, it exploded in controversy and eventually ground to a halt. And now it has finally, truly, died. But nuclear waste remains just as toxic and problematic as ever.
If nuclear waste were covered by environmental laws, i.e., without the current exemptions that limit EPA and state authority, protective federal health and welfare standards can combine with state-level decision-making over where and how the waste could be stored within its borders.
Amending the AEA and removing the provisions that exempt nuclear waste from our hazardous waste and water laws would give us our best chance to garner public acceptance for a process to find safe, technically sound storage sites for toxic nuclear waste—waste that will remain dangerous to human health for hundreds of thousands of years.
Why This Can Work
Consider how things could change if environmental laws could operate as intended.
Under regular environmental law (that covers pollution of air, water, land), the EPA sets strong standards commensurate to the harm of the pollutant. States can then assume the management of that program (or leave it to the EPA) and set additional, stricter standards if they wish.
A state can have strong regulatory authority to set terms for how much waste it might dispose of, how the facility will operate, and the requisite power to enforce those protective standards and protect its citizens—all things it cannot do now for radioactive waste.
To be clear, the standards for high-level radioactive waste will need to be special and extraordinarily protective, and the rulemaking for those standards will be quite a technical ordeal. But, there’s no getting around doing that hard work; Congress tried to take a short cut and it failed.
Once those standards are in place, the EPA and the states can, as in other instances, share the necessary roles of guarding public safety and welfare from radioactive waste. This institutional framework allows for both scientific defensibility of potential sites and, importantly, public acceptance of the process.
The Task Falls to Congress
For far too long many members of Congress and officials in Washington fought any efforts like this as they sought the quick fix of Yucca. Now there’s evidence of change. The ambitious report from the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis included this key recommendation:
Congress should establish a task force comprised of federal, state, local, and tribal officials to study the implications of amending the Atomic Energy Act to remove exemptions from environmental laws for spent fuel and high-level waste, while maintaining federal minimum standards.
Lawmakers should pick up this recommendation, create just such a task force, and move forward with this plan. Will this work? Yes—but it will take both hard work and time.
One thing I can guarantee is that the current approach isn’t working and won’t ever work. No single state is going to willingly accept the entirety of the nation’s nuclear burden without any way to protect their citizens; we have decades of evidence for this proposition. No amount of stomping of feet in the halls of Congress can change that.
Author Information
Geoffrey Fettus is a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean energy program in Washington, D.C. He litigates in federal courts and testifies before Congress on the beginning and end of the nuclear fuel cycle. Prior to joining the NRDC, he was a staff attorney at the New Mexico Environmental Law Center and an assistant attorney general in New Mexico’s Office of the Attorney General.
August 18, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
environment, politics, USA, wastes |
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In deft, distressing ‘Apocalypse Factory,’ Seattle author details Hanford’s role in the dawn of the nuclear age, Aug. 5, 2020 By Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
Book review
On the list of self-inflicted threats to humanity that we shove to the side in order to preserve our sanity, nuclear disaster — along with climate change — ranks at the top. And in Washington state, the toxic legacy of the Hanford nuclear reservation is the chief reminder of that threat.
Hanford produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945 — 75 years ago this Sunday. It also supplied the plutonium for most of the thousands of American nuclear weapons manufactured since then. But in the popular imagination, Hanford looms less prominently than Los Alamos when it comes to stories about the dawn of the nuclear age.
In “The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age,” Seattle writer Steve Olson — who grew up in the small town of Othello, roughly 25 miles northeast of Hanford — capably fills in the gap.
As a young writer, Olson studied with John Hersey — the author of the 1946 book “Hiroshima” — so it’s fitting that “The Apocalypse Factory” includes an expansive, Hersey-like chapter on the horrific consequences of the Nagasaki bombing, drawn from Japanese eyewitness accounts. Nagasaki residents, of course, didn’t know what had hit them and were confounded by the “atomic bomb sickness” that killed people who initially appeared to be uninjured.
The book also encompasses the political and military strategies of the period, along with the “fiendishly difficult” challenges of producing plutonium in a way that wouldn’t kill its makers. Olson writes lucidly, making even the most recondite details of the science involved clear to a nonscientist. And he’s eloquent in his chronicling of the lives affected — and sometimes destroyed — by the invention and use of the world’s most deadly weapon.
“Hanford,” he acknowledges, “represents one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements; it also embodies a moral blindness that could destroy us all.”………
The secrecy surrounding the bomb didn’t end with World War II. Censorship of details about Nagasaki’s destruction and vital info on what radiation sickness could do to humans continued for years. A story by one Chicago Tribune reporter who wangled his way to Nagasaki wasn’t just censored but destroyed. The carbon copy he kept only came to light 60 years later.
Initial jubilation at Japanese surrender was soon tempered by a realization among scientists of just how nightmarish the bombs’ effects were. Decades later, the radioactive pollution at Hanford likewise became impossible to ignore.
“The leaders of the Manhattan Project,” Olson concludes, “did not devote much thought to the mess they were creating.”
In this deft, informative, sometimes terrifying book, that sentence reads like a stinging understatement.
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“The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age” by Steve Olson, Norton, 336 pp., $27.95
August 17, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
- plutonium, weapons and war |
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Work ongoing at US nuclear repository despite virus cases, AntelopeValley Press, 16 Aug 20, CARLSBAD, N.M. (AP) — Managers of the federal government’s underground nuclear waste repository in southern New Mexico say operations are ongoing despite a recent increase in COVID-19 cases among workers.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has seen cases among workers more than double in the last week, the Carlsbad Current-Argus reported.
The plant last Monday announced four new cases among employees of Nuclear Waste Partnership, the contractor that oversees daily operations at the facility. In all, the plant has reported at least 14 positive cases among employees and subcontractors.
The plant is in the second phase of resuming normal operations after having slowed the emplacement of waste this spring when the pandemic began, said spokesperson Bobby St. John. ……….
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The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation’s only location for disposing of tons of Cold War-era waste generated over years of bomb-making and nuclear weapons research. That includes gloves, clothing, tools and other debris contaminated by plutonium and other radioactive elements.
The waste is placed into vaults carved out of an ancient salt formation about a half-mile below the surface.
In January, two dozen shipments were accepted by the facility. Records show that was followed by 10 shipments in February, six in March and seven in April. May saw an increase to 20 shipments when the state of New Mexico began easing some restrictions related to the statewide public health order that had been enacted to slow the spread of the Coronavirus……..
The facility also marked a milestone in July, when it received the first shipments of waste from Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque since 2012. The shipments included waste that has to be handled remotely due to higher levels of radiation.
The shipments were packaged in lead-lined shielded containers that weigh about 1,700 pounds when empty. https://www.avpress.com/business/work-ongoing-at-us-nuclear-repository-despite-virus-cases/article_7821a9e6-df69-11ea-9eea-5f2008c15c73.html
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August 17, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, wastes |
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Feds Propose More Sites For Nuke Waste Storage (Not Disposal) Forbes , Ed Hirs 12 Aug 20,
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is proposing that more locations around the country be used to dispose of very low level radioactive waste. This proposal has raised the ire of environmentalists and nuclear waste storage proponents alike…….
One intractable problem has been what to do with spent fuel rods, which generate very significant levels of radiation for a long time. They come only from nuclear power plants, for the most part, these spent rods are stored onsite while the reactors operate and even after decommissioning.
The very low level radioactive waste is at the heart of the NRC’s current proposal. Under current regulations, the user is required to store the contaminated materials onsite until “either until it has decayed away and can be disposed of as ordinary trash” or until it can be safely contained and shipped to one of four active NRC or state licensed storage
facilities. For many of these items—medical waste, syringes, gloves, clothing—the half-life of material is numbered in days, with a rapid decline to levels that are considered safe for disposal as ordinary trash. However,
radioactive waste from the decommissioning of nuclear reactors, coal ash, construction debris, and oilfield drilling remains radioactive above normal background levels for hundreds of years. Carelessly concentrating this material in landfills can create hazards, as can careless security.
Bad actors can make a considerable profit at the expense of public health. As the United Steelworkers union noted in their public comment urging the NRC against the ruling: “[the ruling]…requires workers with little to no training to handle contaminated material leading to a greater probability of mishandling or improper disposal; and the proposed rule lack[s] requirements to monitor surrounding soil and ground water from any exempt waste location to ensure there is no increase of radiological contamination outside of the potential dumping sites.”
Safe disposal does not equal safety when materials remain active for generations. To improve safety landfills need to keep records for generations, and to deal with low-level contamination appropriately. Over time landfills become golf courses, sources of methane for electricity generation, and mines for reclaiming metal. These activities result in exposure to radiation that future generations must be prepared for. This means meticulous record keeping, which is unlikely to be present across multiple changes of ownership and decades of time.
What the NRC proposes is an expansion of opportunities for things to go wrong. In the past this approach has given us names that remain infamous today: think Love Canal. Brio Refinery. Savannah River and DuPont. It gave us the remains of leaded gasoline.
Water supplies are particularly vulnerable. Historically, the dictum of chemists has been “dilution is the solution.” That works for chemicals. It does not work for radiation, which is being generated continuously.
The current system is better than what is being proposed. Expanding the opportunities for things to go wrong is a step backwards. If the proposal is adopted, today’s laxity and profits will become tomorrow’s health problems and remediation expenses. If we care about coming generations we should leave well enough alone. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2020/08/11/hazardous-nuclear-waste-storage-its-not-disposal/#2086a6624ad3
August 13, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
USA, wastes |
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The Legislature passed a bill into law in 2019 that prohibits the disposal of high-level radioactive waste in North Dakota. For the rules to even take effect, “the first thing you have to do is get that law overturned or thrown out,” State Geologist Ed Murphy said.
What’s in the rules
If the ban is ever struck down and an entity were to approach the state about establishing a storage facility for high-level radioactive waste, officials would look to the 13 pages of rules passed by the Industrial Commission, a three-member panel chaired by Gov. Doug Burgum.
Regulators prep for an industry few want: nuclear waste disposal, Bismarck Tribune, AMY R. SISK, 10 Aug, 20
North Dakota is imposing its first comprehensive rules for nuclear waste disposal more than four years after Pierce County residents were caught off-guard by a proposal to drill test wells near Rugby.
The state Industrial Commission approved the regulations in late July, as well as new rules surrounding deep geothermal wells, another industry that does not exist in North Dakota but could emerge one day.
The waste disposal rules spell out all the steps an entity would have to go through if it were to propose storing “high-level radioactive waste” in North Dakota. Such waste is highly radioactive material generated from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, for example, and it requires permanent isolation……
The Legislature passed a bill into law in 2019 that prohibits the disposal of high-level radioactive waste in North Dakota. For the rules to even take effect, “the first thing you have to do is get that law overturned or thrown out,” State Geologist Ed Murphy said.
“We were writing rules for a program that, by law, is prohibited,” he said.
Roers said the thinking behind establishing the rules in light of the ban is that if the federal government were ever to try to trump North Dakota’s prohibition, it might still agree to follow the regulations established by the state.
What’s in the rules
If the ban is ever struck down and an entity were to approach the state about establishing a storage facility for high-level radioactive waste, officials would look to the 13 pages of rules passed by the Industrial Commission, a three-member panel chaired by Gov. Doug Burgum.
The rules require that anyone looking to study the feasibility of storing the waste in North Dakota obtain an “exploration permit” from the state and secure financial assurance, such as a bond, in order to drill a test well. The state would have up to six months to make a permitting decision and would hold a public hearing. Along with the application, an entity would have to show that it had notified county officials about the project and given them a chance to take a position on it.
If the entity wanted to move forward with a project, it would then need a “facility permit,” which would prompt a similar vetting process. Officials would have up to a year to decide whether to issue a permit.
Before granting a permit, the operator would need to deposit at least $100 million in a new state fund.
“The half-lives of some of the radioactive waste will be dangerous much longer than any sign, monument, or avoidance structures would remain unless they are maintained in perpetuity,” the regulations state. “This money is to be used to ensure the passive institutional controls are maintained for thousands of years.”
If a facility were to make it through the permitting process, it would have to pay an annual operating fee of at least $1 million to the state. It also would need to provide monthly reports on activities at the site and comply with reclamation rules when the site is no longer in use.
Documents regarding the location and depth of the site, as well as details about the half-life of the radioactive waste buried there, must be stored in local, state and national archives — an effort to ensure they last in perpetuity in case the information is needed hundreds or thousands of years down the road, Murphy said.
While counties cannot outright impose a ban on the disposal of the materials, any project would need to adhere to local zoning regulations as to the size, scope and location of the site.
August 11, 2020
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
politics, USA, wastes |
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