A closer look at SNC-Lavalin’s sometimes murky past CBC, 12 Feb 19 One of Canada’s biggest engineering companies is at the centre of what appears to be a growing scandal engulfing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.
The Globe and Mail reported Thursday that SNC-Lavalin lobbied the government to agree to a deferred prosecution agreement or remediation agreement. The company faces charges of fraud and corruption in connection with nearly $48 million in payments made to Libyan government officials between 2001 and 2011.
Trudeau denies he directed his former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to intervene in the prosecution. Wilson-Raybould was shuffled out of her position last month and has refused to comment on the story. Days after the story broke, the federal ethics commissioner confirmed he will investigate claims the prime minister’s office pressured Wilson-Raybould to help SNC-Lavalin avoid prosecution.
SNC-Lavalin has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The case is at the preliminary hearing stage. If convicted, the company could be banned from bidding on any federal government contracts for 10 years.
But the Libya case is just one scandal among many linked to SNC-Lavalin in the past decade.
Allegations of criminal activity are what led to the resignations in February 2012 of top executives Riadh Ben Aïssa and Stéphane Roy. CEO Pierre Duhaime followed them out the door the following month.
MUHC contract scandal…….
Corruption scandal in Bangladesh …….
Libya scandal……
Elections Financing
In late November 2018, former SNC-Lavalin vice-president Normand Morin quietly pleaded guilty to charges of violating Canada’s election financing laws.
According to the compliance agreement reached with the company in 2016, Morin orchestrated a scheme between 2004 and 2011 that used employees to get around the restrictions on companies donating directly to federal political parties. Morin would get employees to donate to political parties, riding associations or Liberal leadership candidates. The company would then reimburse them for their donations through false refunds for personal expenses or fictitious bonuses.
In total, $117,803 flowed from SNC-Lavalin to federal party funds during that period. The Liberal Party of Canada got the lion’s share — $83,534 to the party and $13,552 to various riding associations. Another $12,529 went to contestants in the 2006 Liberal Party leadership race won by Stephane Dion. The Conservative Party of Canada received $3,137 while Conservative riding associations got $5,050.
Ottawa, Monday, March 27, 2023 – Environmental and civil society groups are giving a thumbs-down after the federal government announced new funding on Friday towards the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). The groups will be looking closely at the numbers in Tuesday’s budget.
The “Prime Minister Trudeau and President Biden Joint Statement,“ issued on Friday March 24, committed Canada to provide funding and in-kind support for a US-led program to promote SMRs.
The Canadian government’s Strategic Innovation Fund has already given close to $100 million to corporations working on experimental SMR technologies. In addition, the Canada Infrastructure Bank has committed $970 million to Ontario Power Generation’s plan for a 300-megawatt SMR at Darlington. Federal funding is benefiting US-based companies GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse, and Canada’s SNC-Lavalin, among others.
All the funded SMR projects are still in the research and development phase. Worldwide, no SMRs have ever been built for domestic use.
In addition, the federal government is giving Atomic Energy of Canada Limited $1.35 billion a year to conduct nuclear research and development and to manage its toxic radioactive waste. Nearly all this funding is transferred to a consortium of SNC-Lavalin and two US-based companies (Fluor and Jacobs) that that are heavily involved in nuclear weapons and SMR research.
Over 100 groups from all across Canada have criticized the federal government’s plan to promote SMR nuclear technology, stating that:
SMRs are a dirty, dangerous distraction that will produce radioactive waste of many kinds. Especially worrisome are those proposed reactors that would extract plutonium from irradiated fuel, raising the spectre of nuclear weapons proliferation.
SMRs will take too long to develop to address the urgent climate crisis in the short time frame necessary to achieve Canada’s goals.
SMRs will be much more expensive than renewable energy and energy efficiency. Small reactors will be even more expensive per unit of power than the current large ones, which have priced themselves out of the market.
Nuclear power creates fewer jobs than renewable energy and efficiency. Solar, wind and tidal power are among the fastest-growing job sectors in North America. The International Energy Agency forecasts that 90% of new electrical capacity installed worldwide over the next five years will be renewable.
The federal government needs to invest urgently in renewables, energy conservation and climate action, not slow, expensive, speculative nuclear technologies.
QUOTES:
“Taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on a future technology whose time is past, like nuclear reactors, when truly clean renewable solutions are up-and-running and getting more affordable all the time.” – Dr. Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
“Let’s compete to be world leaders in renewables. Pouring public funding into speculative reactor technologies is sabotaging our efforts to address the climate crisis.” – Dr. Ole Hendrickson, Sierra Club Canada Foundation
The SMR technologies are all at the early R&D stage, yet the funding is not following good governance practices by requiring high standards of peer review.“ – Dr. Susan O’Donnell, Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick
JEFFERSON CITY — Utility companies like Ameren Missouri could begin billing customers for the upfront costs of building nuclear power facilities under a plan advancing in the General Assembly.
In debate Monday, the Missouri House gave preliminary approval to legislation allowing utility companies to add the cost of a new nuclear plant or renewable energy generator to customers’ rates while they’re under construction.
That’s a practice that was banned by Missouri voters in 1976 in response to the utility company’s attempt to collect costs while it was building the state’s first and only nuclear power plant in Callaway County.
Then, and now, consumer advocates object to the concept of forcing utility users to pay for something that is not yet in service, especially when Ameren recently obtained a rate increase and, in February, announced a 7% increase in its quarterly cash dividend, signaling healthy economic times.………………………..
The Consumers Council of Missouri is among those who oppose the plan, saying if the plant is never completed, electric customers still bear the costs.
In South Carolina, the concept enabled a utility to charge ratepayers for the construction of two nuclear reactors that were never completed. During that period, South Carolina ratepayers were charged billions of dollars until the project faltered and ultimately collapsed, the watchdog organization said.
Large industrial users of electricity, including Ford Motor Co. and other manufacturers, also oppose the plan……………………………
Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann, warned that the measure could hurt consumers.
“This particular scheme is essentially giving a blank check to our utility companies,” Clemens said. “We’ll never see productivity out of this scheme.”………………………
The proposal needs a final vote in the House before moving to the Senate for further deliberations.
SMRs are being marketed as a solution to the climate crisis, but they’re already far more expensive and take much longer to build than renewable and storage resources – that we already have.
Utility Dive, David Schlissel, 21 Mar 23, Davis Schlissel is the Institute for Energy Economics anf Financial Analysis director of resource planning analysis.
NuScale is hoping to be among the first of about a dozen companies trying to take advantage of the much-hyped market for small modular nuclear reactors or SMR. So far, however, the Oregon-based company is looking like the first canary in the coal-mine.
Considered a leader in the new technology, NuScale is marketing its SMR project by claiming that the reactor design project will save time and money – persistent problems for traditional large nuclear plants.
But NuScale and the Utah Municipal Power Systems, its partner in an SMR project planned for Idaho, announced early in January, that the target price for the power from their proposed modular reactor had risen by 53% from $58/MWh to $89/MWh……..
The announcement has serious implications for all would-be SMR manufacturers………………
the new $89/MWh target price already means that power from the NuScale SMR will be much more expensive than renewable and storage resources even with an estimated $4.2 billion in tax-payer subsidies.
……………………………….. The gap is only going to get larger as the costs of building SMRs rise and costs of renewables and storage continue to decline.
………….. Using SMRs as backups for renewables will not be financially feasible
Biden has requested an obscene $886 billion for defense, but it could go higher
By William Hartung, 26 Mar 23
The Pentagon has released its budget request for Fiscal Year 2024. The figure for the Pentagon alone is a hefty $842 billion. That’s $69 billion more than the $773 billion the department requested for Fiscal Year 2023
Total spending on national defense — including work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy — comes in at $886 billion. Adding in likely emergency military aid packages for Ukraine later this year plus the potential tens of billions of dollars in Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national defense to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024. The result could be the highest military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the height of the Cold War.
The proposed budget is far more than is needed to provide an effective defense of the United States and its allies.
If past experience is any guide, more than half of the new Pentagon budget will go to contractors, with the biggest share going to the top five — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — to build everything from howitzers and tanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Much of the funding for contractors will come from spending on buying, researching, and developing weapons, which accounts for $315 billion of the new budget request.
he National Priorities Project gives us a look at the imbalance of government spending for 2021 with the military consuming almost half.
As suggested above, Congress will probably add a substantial amount to the Pentagon’s request, largely for systems and facilities located in the states and districts of key members. That’s no way to craft a budget — or defend a country. When it comes to defense, Congress should engage in careful oversight, not special interest politics.
Unfortunately, in recent years the House and Senate have accelerated the practice of jacking up the Pentagon’s budget request, adding $25 billion in FY 2022 and $45 billion in FY 2023. Given threat inflation with respect to China and the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a danger that the $45 billion added for FY2023 could be the floor for what might be added by Congress in the course of this year’s budget debate.
Exceptions to the rush to throw more money at the Pentagon may come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) have introduced the “People Over Pentagon Act,” which calls for a $100 billion annual cut in the DoD budget. A group of conservative lawmakers centered around the Freedom Caucus have called for a freeze on the discretionary budget at FY2022 levels. But different members have given different views on how Pentagon spending would fit into a budget freeze, from assertions that it will be “on the table” to a denial by one at least one member, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), that Pentagon cuts should come into play at all.
It has been reported that President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that we should spend all we need for national defense and not one penny more. But the new motto of the Pentagon and the Congress appears to be “spend now and ask questions later.” Rather than matching funding to a viable national security strategy, the Pentagon and the Congress are pushing for whatever the political market will bear. The notion that tradeoffs need to be made against other urgent national priorities is a foreign concept to most members of the House and Senate, as they have routinely raised the Pentagon budget at the expense of other urgent national needs.
There is more than money at stake. An open-ended strategy that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.
We can make America and its allies safer for far less money if we adopt a more realistic, restrained strategy and drive a harder bargain with weapons contractors that too often engage in price gouging and cost overruns while delivering dysfunctional systems that aren’t appropriate for addressing the biggest threats to our security.
The Congressional Budget Office has crafted three illustrative options that could ensure our security while spending $1 trillion less over the next decade. A strategy that incorporates aspects of these plans and streamlines the Pentagon budget in other areas could be sustained at roughly $150 billion per year less than current levels.
A new approach would take a more objective, evidence-based view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China, rely more on allies to provide security in their own regions, reduce the U.S. global military footprint, and scale back the Pentagon’s $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. Cutting wasteful spending practices and slowing or replacing spending on unworkable or outmoded systems like the F-35 and a new $13 billion aircraft carrier could save billions more. And reducing spending on the half a million-plus private contractors employed by the Pentagon could save hundreds of billions over the next decade.
The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending. It needs more spending discipline, tied to a realistic strategy that sets clear priorities and acknowledges that some of the greatest risks we face are not military in nature. Today’s announcement is just the opening gambit in this year’s debate over the Pentagon budget. Hopefully critics of runaway spending will have more traction this year than has been the case for the past several years. If not, $1 trillion in annual military spending may be just around the corner, at great cost to taxpayers and to the safety and security of the country as a whole.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force.
A 1960 Strategic Air Command training video familiarized B-52 crews with the devastating effects of nuclear weapons and how to navigate through a nuclear battlefield.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently declassified some very interesting training films and film reports that the Strategic Air Command prepared in the 1960s to prepare bomber pilots and crews for a potential nuclear war. Among these there is the United States Air Force Training Film 5363, “Nuclear Effects During SAC Delivery Missions,” made in 1960 and which kept its secret classification until now.
The purpose of Training Film 5363 was to familiarize SAC pilots and crew members with the devastating effects of nuclear weapons detonations and the detailed plans that were developed so the crews could evade the dangers of a nuclear battlefield and return home after completing their mission. These plans were among the contents of the “Combat Mission Folders,” which included guidance needed to reach targets and return to base safely and were assigned to each nuclear-armed bomber on alert duty.
…………………… The film begins with a B-52 flying a sortie of the Emergency War Order, launched under Positive Control and on its way to the “go/no-go” position, but without the crew knowing if this is a real mission or an exercise until they get there. Before eventually going in, however, the narrator explains that, while they know that the mission can be successfully accomplished as it was carefully planned and reviewed by highly qualified combat planners and they flew countless profile missions, they need to know the nuclear effects of a detonation.
The narrator then takes the viewers trough the basics of a nuclear detonation’s thermal, blast and radiation effects and the efforts that the U.S. Air Force had taken to prepare the crews for situations where they might experience them. In fact, the central part of the film covers the effects of nuclear explosions of both aircraft and crew and the measures taken to minimize crew exposure, like carefully planned routes that created a safe distance between the bomber and the detonation of their weapon and the detonations caused by other SAC bombers operating in the same area.
The film then returns to the B-52 approaching the turnaround point, when then a radio message from SAC comes in: “Sky King. Sky King. This is Migrate. This is Migrate. Do not answer. Break. Break. Alpha Sierra Foxtrot Juliet Oscar Papa Mike Tango. Break. Go-Code.” The crew scrambles to verify the code and discover that this is the go code for a real mission: “Pilot to crew. We checked the go code and verified it. This is it. We’re going in”.
After a very brief moment of disbelief, the crew members get down to business and prepare the aircraft for the nuclear strike mission as they are about to cross the H-Hour Control Line on the way to their assigned target in the Soviet Union. As they navigate towards the target, the crew experience the shockwave from another nuclear bomb dropped in the vicinity of their route, before a low-altitude flight over lakes, mountains, forests and fields to avoid Soviet air defense missiles…………………………………………………. more https://theaviationist.com/2023/03/26/declassified-video-shows-how-b-52-crews-would-conduct-cold-war-nuclear-strikes/
Those are expenditures for America’s privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)
According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.
Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.
Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.” ………………………………
If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results………………………………………………………………………………………………
The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest………………………………………………….. more https://theduran.com/where-the-1-3-trillion-per-year-u-s-military-budget-goes/
Scottish Baroness Annabel Goldie, a conservative deputy minister of defense in the government of the United Kingdom, has confirmed that the U.K. will be sending depleted uranium shells to the Ukrainian military for use against Russian forces.
In response to a parliamentary crossbench question from Lord Hylton on March 20, Goldie stated:
“Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armor-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles.”
Depleted uranium is highly toxic to humans, leading to cancers, birth defects and other horrific outcomes. According to the journal Scientific American:
“Used as ammunition, it penetrates the thick steel encasing enemy tanks; used as armor, it protects troops against attack. And when it was used in the Gulf War and later during the Allied bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo, depleted uranium (DU) was hailed as the new silver bullet that would solve most of the military’s problems. After the end of Operation Allied Force, however, several Italian soldiers were diagnosed with leukemia. Politicians and the media soon forged a link between the disease and depleted uranium use. They further drew a parallel with Gulf War Syndrome, and in no time, depleted uranium became the Agent Orange of the Balkan conflict.”
This decision to send depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine did not go unnoticed by the Russians……………………
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova chimed in with the following statement:
“We consider the plans officially confirmed by the UK Department of Defense for the transfer of depleted uranium shells to Ukraine as a step fraught with a further escalation of the conflict. The British supply of weapons to Kiev, especially such sensitive species, leads to further destabilization of the situation and pushes the prospect of finding mutually acceptable interruptions. They are contrary to international law. The radioactivity, high toxicity and carcinogenicity of such weapons are well known. Among the consequences of using depleted uranium – the growth of oncological diseases among the population and the enormous environmental damage for the Ukrainian territory where it will be applied.
“The civilians of Serbia and Iraq, who still feel the impact of such actions, can tell about all of this. It is unlikely that the leadership of the UK itself, which was directly involved in these conflicts, forgot about it.”
Biden administration spokesman John Kirby dismissed the Russian concerns about depleted uranium as “a straw man” and, like the U.S. government has always done, he denied there are any negative health effects of depleted uranium. To do otherwise would be to admit that the U.S. poisoned thousands of its own troops in Iraq, as well as the Iraqi people.
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, March 23, 2023
People exposed to low doses of ionizing radiation have an extra, but modest, risk of developing heart disease during their lifetime, according to a new study(link is external and opens in a new window) published by an international consortium of researchers.
“The study suggests that radiation exposure, across a range of doses, may be related to an increased risk of not just cancer, as has been previously appreciated, but also of cardiovascular diseases,” says Andrew Einstein, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and one of the study’s senior authors.
“It should not steer people away from receiving radiation if necessary—in fact many medical uses of radiation are lifesaving—but it underscores the importance of ensuring that radiation is used appropriately and kept as low as reasonably achievable.”…………
The researchers used data from 93 studies covering all ranges of radiation exposures to find a relationship between dose and heart disease.
They found an increased excess lifetime risk of 2.3 to 3.9 cardiovascular deaths per 100 persons exposed to one Gy of radiation. (In the United States, about 25 out of every 100 people die from cardiovascular disease; a person exposed to 1 Gy of radiation will have a slightly higher, 27% to 29%, risk of dying from cardiovascular disease).
Few people other than those receiving radiation therapy will receive 1 Gy during their lives. But the researchers also found a higher risk of heart disease at low dose ranges (<0.1 Gy) more commonly experienced by the public and also for protracted exposures to low doses.
More research is needed to determine the precise increased excess lifetime risk of heart disease from these low doses.
“The effect of lower doses of radiation on the heart and blood vessels may have been underestimated in the past,” Einstein says. “Our new study suggests that guidelines and standards for protection of workers exposed to radiation should be reconsidered, and efforts to ensure optimal radiation protection of patients should be redoubled.”
Depleted uranium, used in some types of ammunition and military armour, is the dense, low-cost leftover once uranium has been processed….
A high-ranking official from Veterans Affairs says a handful of vets mistakenly believe their bodies have been damaged by depleted uranium…..
the Federal Court of Canada has found depleted uranium to be an issue. The court ruled the Veterans Affairs Department must compensate retired serviceman Steve Dornan for a cancer his doctors say resulted from exposure to depleted uranium residue.
Poisoned soldier plans hunger strike at minister’s office in exchange for care, Montreal CTV.ca Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press, 30 Oct 11, MONTREAL — An ex-soldier who says he was poisoned while serving overseas is planning to go on a hunger strike outside the office of Canada’s veterans affairs minister until he gets medical treatment.
KSL, By Susan Montoya Bryan, Associated Press – March 22, 2023
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — U.S. regulators say they need more time to wrap up a final safety report and make a decision on whether to license a multibillion-dollar complex meant to temporarily store tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants around the nation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a new schedule Monday, citing unforeseen staffing constraints. The agency was initially expected to issue a decision by the end of March. It will now be the end of May.
The announcement comes just days after New Mexico approved legislation aimed at stopping the project. It’s expected that supporters of the storage facility will take the fight to court, but New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Tuesday asked the NRC to suspend its consideration of the license application……………………………………………………
Since the federal government has failed to build a permanent repository, it reimburses utilities to house the fuel in either steel-lined concrete pools of water or in steel and concrete containers known as casks at sites in nearly three dozen states. That cost is expected to stretch into the tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The legislation signed by Lujan Grisham last week requires that the state provide consent for bringing in such radioactive material. Consent from the Democratic governor would be unlikely, as she has argued that without a permanent repository, New Mexico stands to be the nation’s de facto dumping ground.
She reiterated her opposition in the letter to NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson.
“Thank you for respecting the state of New Mexico’s laws and the voices of our citizens, tribes and pueblos who overwhelming(ly) supported this legislation,” she wrote.
Similar battles have been waged in Nevada, Utah and Texas over the decades as the U.S. has struggled to find a home for spent fuel and other radioactive waste. The proposed Yucca Mountain project in Nevada was mothballed and a temporary storage site planned on a Native American reservation in Utah was sidelined despite being licensed by the NRC in 2006.
That project would have been located on land belonging to the Skull Valley Band of Goshute. Utah’s governor at the time — Republican Mike Leavitt — was among those fighting the effort. He and others were successful in getting Congress to amend a defense spending bill, essentially landlocking the site by creating the Cedar Mountain Wilderness and blocking a rail spur that would have delivered casks.
But it was only six weeks later that the NRC issued a license for the project.
Don Hancock with the nuclear watchdog group Southwest Research and Information Center pointed to the Utah case.
Case dates back to ‘serious near-miss’ incident involving a canister filled with nuclear waste.
San Diego Union-Tribune BY ROB NIKOLEWSKI, MARCH 7, 2023
A lawsuit seeking the release of internal communications surrounding an incident nearly five years ago at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will continue after a ruling Monday by a federal judge in San Diego.
U.S. District Judge John A. Houston turned down a motion by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to toss out the case brought by San Diego attorney Michael Aguirre.
The judge also determined that while the NRC was within its rights to redact some documents it had previously released, the federal regulator “has not provided sufficient evidence” to show that it made a reasonable effort to search for documents requested by Aguirre under the Freedom of Information Act.
The case is “still alive,” Aguirre said of the judge’s decision. “We’re going to keep digging hard to find the documents that will hopefully inform the public about what happened.”
A spokesman for the NRC said the commission is reviewing the judge’s order and had no comment to make on it.
The case dates to Aug. 3, 2018, when workers at the plant operated by Southern California Edison were transferring canisters filled with highly radioactive spent fuel from storage pools to a newly constructed dry storage facility at the north end of the plant. During the transfers, each canister is lowered into a protected vertical cavity.
Operators thought they had successfully lowered one particular canister but discovered it instead got stuck on the inner ring of the cavity, left unsupported by support rigging, about 18 feet from the floor of the enclosure. Eventually, the canister was safely deposited…………………………………………………………………………………………
Washington ― A bipartisan group of Great Lakes lawmakers introduced a resolution in Congress on Wednesday to oppose a Canadian proposal to permanently store spent nuclear fuel waste in the Great Lakes Basin.
The move comes ahead of President Joe Biden’s first trip to Canada as president this week to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The resolution is concerned with Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which plans to decide next year on one of two potential sites for a nuclear waste facility, either Ignace, Ontario, or South Bruce, which is in the Great Lakes basin and less than 40 miles from Lake Huron.
The resolution says that Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should ensure that the government of Canada does not permanently store nuclear waste in the Great Lakes Basin.
It goes on to warn that a “spill” of such waste into the lakes during transit to a deep geological repository “could have lasting and severely adverse environmental, health and economic impacts on the Great Lakes and the individuals who depend on the Great Lakes for their livelihoods.”
The measure is led by U.S. Reps. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township, and John James, R-Farmington Hills, in the House and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, in the Senate.
“Storing hazardous nuclear waste in our shared waterways threatens the drinking water of millions of people in the United States and Canada, and jeopardizes jobs in the fishing, boating and tourism industries,” Kildee said in a statement. “I urge President Biden to address Canada’s plan to permanently bury nuclear waste in the Great Lakes basin as he meets with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.”
The resolution has 15 other House co-sponsors including Michigan Reps. Jack Bergman of Watersmeet, John Moolenaar of Caledonia, Bill Huizenga of Holland, Lisa McClain of Bruce Township, Debbie Dingell of Ann Arbor, Elissa Slotkin of Lansing, Hillary Scholten of Grand Rapids, Haley Stevens of Birmingham and Shri Thanedar of Detroit as well as five Senate co-sponsors, including Sen. Gary Peters of Bloomfield Township………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/michigan/2023/03/22/measure-opposes-canadian-plan-to-store-nuclear-waste-near-lake-huron/70036108007/
Hanford represents “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”
as Washington residents learned long ago, it is difficult to draw federal attention to a remote site in our state.
For too long, the federal government has kept cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation toward the bottom of its to-do list. “It’s a nice idea,” a long string of presidential administrations have seemed to say. “We’ll get to it eventually.”
With such nonchalance being the prevailing attitude for decades, the fact that President Joe Biden’s proposed 2024 federal budget includes record funding for Hanford is encouraging. But it is far from cause for celebration.
Congress must join the administration in recognizing the importance of the site and approving the president’s request for some $3 billion for Hanford. The issue is not only a matter of cleaning up hazardous, radioactive waste in Washington; it is about the federal government fulfilling its moral and court-ordered duty.
“There’s more work to do, but this is a big step in the right direction to getting this cleanup done efficiently, effectively and safely,” Gov. Jay Inslee wrote on Twitter this week.
Beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers, which puts Washington leaders in a difficult spot. While the proposal for increased funding is a step in the right direction, it does not mitigate years of inattention by the federal government. Nor does it fully fund cleanup at what is considered the nation’s most contaminated radioactive site.
Hanford, once the hub of plutonium production for the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons, now is home to underground tanks holding 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. Many of those tanks are known to be leaking, and with the site’s proximity to the Columbia River — 200 miles upstream from Vancouver — federal officials should have brought urgency to the project long ago.
“The citizens living along banks of the Columbia River deserve to know the full story of what is happening with the Hanford tanks,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., once wrote to Department of Energy officials, who oversee Hanford cleanup.
That was in 2014. Citizens still are waiting for significant progress.
According to the Tri-City Herald, Biden’s proposed budget would increase spending on a vitrification plant at Hanford from its current $875 million to $1 billion; that plant is being prepared to treat radioactive waste for disposal. The budget also would add an extra $34 million for work at the tank farms.
Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, whose district includes the Hanford site, long has worked to draw attention to the cleanup. So have Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. As Congress considers the details of Biden’s budget proposal, Washington lawmakers — including Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania — should impress upon their colleagues the importance of Hanford.
Every state and every congressional district has its own needs, but a site largely unknown to the rest of the country warrants special attention. As journalist Joshua Frank wrote last year in the book “Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America,” Hanford represents “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”
With Murray serving as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee — and with Newhouse sitting on the House Appropriations Committee — there is hope that Hanford funding will remain unscathed when Congress takes a scalpel to Biden’s proposed budget. But as Washington residents learned long ago, it is difficult to draw federal attention to a remote site in our state.
