Summary of Oscar Shirani’s Allegations of Quality Assurance Violations Against Holtec Storage/Transport Casks

Now that Holtec International and the Eddy-Lea [Counties] Energy Alliance (ELEA) want to open a parking lot dump in Southeastern New Mexico, it's time to look back at these whistleblower revelations from more than a decade ago:

• Summary of Oscar Shirani’s Allegations of Quality Assurance Violations Against Holtec Storage/Transport Casks. July 22, 2004.
• Dr. Ross Landsman, NRC dry cask inspector for the Midwest regional office headquartered in Chicago, wrote this memo to his superiors expressing his full support for whistleblower Oscar Shirani’s quality assurance allegations against the Holtec storage/transport casks (handwritten notes by Oscar Shirani, mentioning the devious manner in which Exelon Nuclear orchestrated his firing and defending itself against his wrongful termination lawsuit.

Shirani questioned the structural integrity of the Holtec containers sitting still, going zero miles per hour, let alone traveling 60 miles per hour -- or faster -- on railways.

Landsman has compared the QA violations involving Holtec containers, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's incompetence (or worse, collusion) -- having done nothing about it -- as similar to the reasons why Space Shuttles have hit the ground.

Update on April 11, 2017 by admin

Recently, Donna Gilmore of San Onofre Safety has documented numerous concerns, and raised many serious questions, about the safety (or lack thereof) of Holtec containers.

Holtec storage containers have been deployed at some three dozen U.S. atomic reactors, including, most recently, at the permanently shutdown San Onofre nuclear power plant in southern CA. Remarkably, the Holtec storage containers have been located immediately adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, in a seismically active zone that is also vulnerable to tsunamis!

Beyond Nuclear advocates Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS), as safely as possible, as close to the point of generation as possible. In the case of San Onofre, Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base is literally right across the highway, to the east. San Onofre's irradiated nuclear fuel could be moved a short distance inland, and to higher ground, away from Pacific coast earthquake faultlines, and out of the tsunami zone. The Marine Corps itself could provide security. This makes much more sense than shipping the wastes nearly a thousand miles, across multiple states, to admittedly "interim" storage in southeastern New Mexico (itself vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.)!