The solitary transport route map in Holtec's license application Environment Report, which accounts for only four of the 131 atomic reactors in the U.S. WCS/ISP's LA ER route map is nearly identical, differing only in destination point, just 39 miles from Holtec's.Submit your public comments, here:
The NRC will accept email comments at: WCS_CISF_EIS@nrc.gov.
*The Docket ID, NRC-2016-0231, and the report number, NUREG-2239, should be included in the subject line of comments, as well as at the top of the text of the body of your emailed comments.*
Comments can also be submitted at http://www.regulations.gov or sent by snail mail to: Office of Administration, Mail Stop: TWFN-7-A60M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, ATTN: Program Management, Announcements and Editing Staff.
See the DEIS posted online, here:
Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the WCS/ISP high-level radioactive waste dump proposal for Texas: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2012/ML20122A220.pdf
(If that NRC online posted version opens too slowly for you, or not at all, please contact Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear at <kevin@beyondnuclear.org> or (240) 462-3216. Kevin can forward an email containing the DEIS to you. It is a very large document -- too large to load onto the Beyond Nuclear website directly, or else we would simply post it here.)
The current public comment deadline is November 3rd, 2020. [It had been September 4th, 2020, but in the early afternoon of July 16, 2020, NRC announced a 60-day extension.]
Despite the ongoing pandemic national emergency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public comment period on its WCS/ISP high-level radioactive waste dump proposal is ticking down to the current November 3rd deadline.
It's important we begin the submission of large numbers of quality comments, even while we seek more time/a deadline extension. Our nationwide environmental coalition also seeks more meetings along transport routes, once safe to do so post-pandemic (please urge your Members of Congress to demand public comment meetings in your congressional district/state, as well as a deadline extension).
Your comments can be as short, or as long, as you would like to make them. You can also submit multiple, shorter installments of comments to NRC, if you choose to do it that way, or else all your comments, all at once.
Choose one or more ideas below, and use them to prepare your own comments, in your own words (also feel free to cut and paste them verbatim).
*Please include the Docket ID Number, NRC-2016-0231, and the report number, NUREG-2239, in the email subject line of comments, as well as at the top of the text of the body of your emailed comments.*
For some ideas on comments you could submit, consider:
The Holtec/ELEA, NM and ISP/WCS, TX CISFs share a LOT in common. They are only 40 miles apart, for one thing. So a good source of ideas for sample comments you can use to prepare your own, are Beyond Nuclear's comments in the Holtec proceeding, filed by the Sept. 22 deadline in that case. Also, Beyond Nuclear has posted comments by other opponents to the Holtec dump, at its Centralized Storage section, many on 9/22, or leading up to it. Feel free to tap that source of ideas!
Another idea for a motherlode of commentary issues comes in the form of the legal interventions against the ISP/WCS CISF, filed by a broad coalition of environmental groups on Nov. 13, 2018. See the content within brackets below for more info., and links to additional documentation and ideas:
[On Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018, a coalition of environmental groups legally intervened in opposition to the Waste Control Specialists/Interim Storage Partners centralized interim storage facility (CISF) for irradiated nuclear fuel, targeted at Andrews County, Texas, by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's deadline.
See an 8-page SUMMARY of the Don't Waste MI, et al., contentions, here.
As part of its intervention, the seven-group coalition's legal counsel, Lodge, filed an expert witness declaration by Dr. James David Ballard, entitled "Interim Storage Partners: Transportation of the Inventory and the Storage of Highly Radioactive Waste Materials."
Lodge also filed an expert witness declaration by Robert Alvarez, Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and former senior policy adviser to the Secretary of Energy and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment at the U.S. Department of Energy from 1993 to 1999. The expert witness declaration is entitled "Comments on the Application for a License for a Consolidated Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility by Waste Control Specialists LLC (Docket No. 72-1050)," which includes the following subject matter: Failure to Accurately Address Life-Cycle Costs; High Burnup Spent Nuclear Fuel; and Repackaging for Disposal.
(Both Taylor and Lodge, on behalf of the Sierra Club, as well as the national grassroots environmental coalition, have also legally intervened against the Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance CISF, targeted at southeastern NM, just 40 miles from WCS/ISP's CISF in West Texas.)
For its part, Beyond Nuclear legally intervened against the WCS/ISP CISF on Oct. 3, 2018. Beyond Nuclear's legal counsel includes Diane Curran of Harmon, Curran in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.
(Beyond Nuclear has also intervened against Holtec/ELEA's CISF in NM.
Beyond Nuclear has also filed motions to dismiss both the NM and TX CISF proceedings. However, NRC rejected these motions to dismiss, so Beyond Nuclear has been forced to engage in the NRC licensing proceedings.)]
{And check out these ideas for comments you can use to prepare your own for submission to NRC. This link -- <http://www.beyondnuclear.org/waste-transportation/2018/10/11/radioactive-waste-is-coming-through-your-town-unless-you-hel.html> -- is to sample comments by opponents to ISP/WCS's CISF, during the NRC's environmental scoping phase in 2018. In particular, check out these comprehensive comments submitted by Public Citizen and SEED Coalition. As NRC ignored many, to most, to all of these environmental scoping comments, as shown by the half-baked DEIS NRC has published, it is worth doubling down, and emphasizing the objections our side has been making for years, at this later DEIS stage!}
And read on for yet more ideas, below...
(1) The national, so-called "low-level" radioactive waste dump at Waste Control Specialists, LLC (WCS) in extreme west Texas, immediately upon the New Mexico state border near the largely Hispanic community of Eunice, NM, already threatens the Ogallala Aquifer with radioactive contamination over time. The Ogallala is the source of vital drinking and irrigation water for eight states on the High Plains. This WCS/ISP CISF (Interim Storage Partners Consolidated Interim Storage Facility) for highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel, and Greater-Than-Class-C (GTCC) "low-level" radioactive wastes, would add to the high risk that hazardous radioactive waste would contaminate the vital, irreplacable Ogallala, over time.
(2) You could also comment that NRC's time-limited focus on just 40 years of "temporary storage" is inappropriately, arbitrarily short, given clear evidence that "interim storage" could persist for not decades, but a century, or centuries (also known as de facto permanent); and in NRC's own 2014 Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule and Generic EIS (formerly called Nuclear Waste Confidence), the agency acknowledged away-from-reactor ISFSIs (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations) could go on indefinitely (that is, forevermore). Institutional control could be lost over such long time periods. Failed containers could release catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity directly into the surface environment, to blow downwind, flow downstream, bio-concentrate up the food chain, and harm people down the generations.
(3) You could also protest NRC's woefully inadequate, to nearly non-existent, treatment of highly radioactive waste transport risks. This violates the long-established legal requirement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that NRC take a "hard look" at the major federal action of licensing the WCS/ISP CISF proposal, including its inextricably linked high-risk transportation component, impacting most states in the Lower 48. (See the 2017 transportation route and shipment number documents posted online by the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, its analysis of the same 2008 U.S. Department of Energy Yucca Mountain, NV document that NRC itself cites as its excuse for not having to do a CISF-specific transport analysis in 2020!) Road and rail shipments, by heavy-haul truck or legal weight truck, as well as trains, represent potential Mobile Chernobyls and Dirty Bombs on Wheels, in terms of accident or attack risks; and Mobile X-ray Machines That Can't Be Turned Off, in terms of "routine" or "incident-free" gamma- and neutron-radiation emissions at close range.
Also see route maps for potential "Floating Fukushima" barge shipments into ports on bays, rivers, harbors, lakes, and seacoasts across the country.
For its part, WCS/ISP's License Application Environment Report (LA ER) accounts for routes to TX from only four of our country's total of 131 atomic reactors -- three at San Onofre, CA and one at Maine Yankee -- but NRC's DEIS didn't even include this sole, inadequate map! (See WCS/ISP's solitary map, linked here, as well as Holtec/ELEA's nearly identical one, reproduced, above left, at the top of this posting. Compare these, to the more comprehensive map, produced by the State of NV re: the Yucca dump targeting Western Shoshone land, based on the same 2008 DOE Final Supplemental EIS that NRC cites in its 2020 CISF DEIS's.)
Please note on WCS/ISP's own route map that long stretches of TX and OK would be hit, coming and going. Transports coming from the east, and then WCS/ISP CISF shipments going to Yucca Mountain, NV, would traverse the same routes in TX and OK. This double whammy represents a multiplication of transport risks, for no good reason whatsoever, for these many communities in TX and OK. The reason is the nuclear power industry's desire to expedite transfer of title (ownership) and liability for the highly radioactive wastes ASAP, onto the U.S. Department of Energy (that is, federal taxpayers), even in the absence of a permanent repository. This is a violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended (see point #5, as well as the May 28th UPDATE re: internal contradictions, re: the Private Fuel Storage, LLC CISF license, revealed in NRC's CISF DEIS Overviews, below).
NRC's DEIS, and WCS/ISP's ER, essentially exclude the high risks of transport, and are not even transparent about transport routes. This represents segmentation (the dividing up of a major federal action into smaller parts, so that the proposal doesn't seem so significant or impactful after all). This is a violation of NEPA, as long ruled so by the federal courts.
And in talking point #4, immediately below, note that the HLRW may then have to be divided up at the CISF(s) into 80,000 smaller containers, in order to fit in the permanent repository for permanent burial. This would mean 80,000 shipments to the Yucca dump on Western Shoshone land in NV, under the CISFs' and NRC's assumptions. 80,000 additional shipments from the CISF(s) to the Yucca dump would represent a significant increase in transportation risks. That's a lot of roles of the dice.
(4) Another comment could be that inner canisters will have to be transferred multiple times (from on-site storage dry casks, to radiation shielded transfer casks, to transport/shipping casks, to transfer casks, to CISF storage casks; and then, if and when high-level radioactive wastes are exported to a geologic repository, the reverse process, culminating somehow, somewhere, someday, with final HLRW emplacement into containers approved for permanent burial). Yet, NRC is not requiring Dry Transfer Systems (DTS), nor any type of hot cell, so there will be no way to deal with failed fuel or containers, as well as leaks or contamination. (And expert witness Bob Alvarez, a former senior advisor to the U.S. Energy Secretary, has testified in these CISF proceedings that under DOE's latest Yucca dump plans, targeting Western Shoshone land in NV, high-level radioactive wastes can only be buried in TADs -- standardized Transport, Aging, and Disposal containers, specially designed for permanent disposal use at the Yucca dump. This would require dividing up the contents of several thousand containers at WCS/ISP's CISF, into 80,000 smaller TADs. Nowhere is this addressed in the WCS/ISP ER, nor in the NRC DEIS. And yet both WCS/ISP and NRC assume Yucca will be the ultimate dump, itself an outrage -- see sample talking point #6, below. But that repackaging process carries significant risks and potential impacts for health, environment, and safety, and yet could not be done without a DTS. This entire complex, high risk subject matter area is missing from NRC's WCS/ISP CISF DEIS, another violation of NEPA's "hard look" requirement, and even a violation of the Atomic Energy Act, given the inherent, large safety risks.)
(5) Yet another comment idea is to point out NRC staff's internal contradiction: it is willing to overlook this CISF's violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended (which prohibits the U.S. Department of Energy from taking ownership of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel at an interim site in the absence of an open permanent repository), while citing in the DEIS that the lack of a legally-binding decision by DOE and Congress re: highly radioactive Greater-Than-Class-C "low-level" radioactive waste, means NRC will choose to refrain from reviewing that aspect of the proposal any further at this time. NRC is talking out both sides of its mouth, to the benefit of license applicant WCS/ISP, and to the disadvantage of the public interest! And the double standard re: rule of law is also outrageous NRC behavior. NRC must obey, and not violate, all federal laws, including the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended. To violate that law is itself a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. (See this April 27, 2020 Beyond Nuclear press release for more info., in the context of Holtec/ELEA. However, NRC is doing the very same thing in this WCS/ISP proceeding.)
(6) WCS/ISP and NRC assume that the Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada, targeting Western Shoshone Indian land, will open, allowing re-export of irradiated nuclear fuel from TX to NV for permanent disposal. It's how WCS/ISP and NRC attempt to justify calling the CISF "interim" or temporary. But the Yucca dump should not, and will not, happen, for a long list of reasons. This includes the Yucca dump's illegality (it would violate the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, signed by the U.S. government with the Western Shoshone Indian Nation), as well as the environmental injustice of opening the national high-level radioactive waste dump in the same state that "hosted" nuclear weapons testing for several decades on end, resulting in disastrous radioactive fallout and health and ecological damage downwind. But it also includes Yucca's flagrant scientific unsuitability, as well as the fact that well over a thousand environmental groups have been actively opposing the scheme for 33 years. WCS/ISP and NRC are entirely unjustified in assuming the Yucca dump will open someday, or year, or decade, or century. In fact, NRC's doing so reveals its bias in the Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding, in which it is supposed to be a neutral safety regulator, only sitting in judgment of the Yucca site's capability of meeting regulations, not advocating for its opening even in the face of its clear unsuitability. For this reason, there is a very high risk that the WCS/ISP CISF in TX will become de facto permanent surface storage, a parking lot dump, risking catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity directly into the environment when containers ultimately fail over a long enough period of time, due to loss of institutional control. (See point #2 above.)
(7) Check out the following Overview of Environmental Coalition Contentions Opposing Holtec/ELEA’s CISF, and the NRC ASLB Licensing Proceeding, for ideas on NRC WCS/IPS CISF DEIS public comments that could be submitted, or at least subject matter ideas to consider for comments. Again, the two CISFs are very similar in nature, and very close together physically, separated by only 39 miles. As you'll see, the voluminous 40+ contentions submitted by numerous official intervenors to the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, opposed to Holtec's CISF, we have here tried to summarize in 20 one-line sentences. So in that sense, it's a topic summary. Subject matter areas, to consider making comments about at this DEIS stage. Because the NRC staff has done little to nothing about any of it, in either the NM or the TX licensing proceedings, even though we've been bringing these things up since the NRC environmental scoping stages in 2017 (TX) and 2018 (NM), as well as throughout the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) licensing proceedings, for a couple long years now. (Actually, an environmental coalition of groups first wrote NRC about certain matters as early as October 2016.) Thus, the following Holtec/ELEA contentions, can be adapted and adopted for use in the WCS/ISP CISF DEIS public comment opportunity. In fact, we have changed a couple of the points below already, to make them more directly applicable to WCS/ISP (such as, the fact that the Ogallala Aquifer is located either very nearby or even directly beneath ISP/WCS -- also see talking point #1, above).
In the context of Holtec/ELEA, Beyond Nuclear created the documentation below in mid- to late-December 2018, in anticipation of the in-person ASLB (Atomic Safety and Licensing Board) oral argument pre-hearings that then took place in late January 2019 in ABQ, NM, which had just been announced, as part of media work and public education efforts, to help reporters and concerned citizens get up to speed, so they could wrap their heads around the broad and deep interventions our coalition had mounted in opposition to Holtec's CISF.
Here are links to a .Docx (with hot links to more documentation), and to a .pdf, versions of this document:
Overview of Environmental Coalition Contentions Opposing Holtec/ELEA’s CISF, and the NRC ASLB Licensing Proceeding [.pdf format]
And now here are those 20 one-sentence summaries (see sub-points (a) through (s), below) for 40 contentions/objections filed against Holtec's CISF in the NRC ASLB licensing proceedings --
Overview of Environmental Coalition Contentions Opposing Holtec/ELEA’s CISF, and the NRC ASLB Licensing Proceeding (for potential application in the WCS/ISP proceeding as well, during the current DEIS public comment period):
As detailed in the environmental coalition filings,
the dozens of contentions filed on September 14, 2018 include the following categories (some of the contentions were raised by multiple intervenors; the total number of contentions filed adds up to 40):
(a) impacts on potential Native American and other historic and pre-historic properties/"resources" on or near the site (including Native American graves and sacred sites);
(b) insufficient assurances of financing for construction, operation, and decommissioning;
(c) underestimation of so-called “low-level” radioactive waste volumes that would be generated;
(d) improper reliance on NRC generic Environmental Impact Statement presumptions;
(e) natural gas fracking and other oil extraction activities near to, or even beneath, the site (note that Fasken Oil and Ranch has intervened in both proceedings, against Holtec/ELEA in NM, as well as WCS/ISP in TX, because it owns mineral rights adjacent to, nearby, or even underneath, both proposed CISFs);
(f) cumulative risks of future reprocessing (plutonium extraction -- Orano/Areva/Cogema, a leading ISP/WCS CISF partner, is an international leader in the dirty, dangerous, and expensive "business" of reprocessing);
(g) the public health threat from the “Start Clean/Stay Clean” philosophy’s very high risks of shipping damaged, leaking, or contaminated casks back to the atomic reactor of origin;
(h) incomplete and inadequate disclosure of transportation routes (road, rail, and waterway), and inadequate analyses of the substantial risks of these shipments through most states, over decades;
(i) inconsistent predicted lengths for “interim storage” period, from several decades, to a century, or centuries, or even de facto permanently (forevermore), timeframes that could dangerously exceed the design and service life of the containers;
(j) unmet safety and security risk analyses for the scale of transport and storage proposed;
(k) troubling geological formations and conditions beneath the site, including the presence of the Ogallala Aquifer, vital to eight High Plains states for drinking and irrigation water (see sample talking point #1, above);
(l) no compelling purpose and need for the CISF;
(m) risk of the CISF becoming a de facto permanent surface storage “parking lot dump”;
(n) WCS/ISP’s improper reliance on the Blue Ribbon Commission for America’s Nuclear Future’s 2012 Final Report;
(o) earthquake risks at the site;
(p) impacts on endangered and threatened species, such as two species of lizard included in Sierra Club contentions opposing the WCS/ISP CISF;
(q) thermal concerns associated with corrosion of the containers;
(r) groundwater concerns at the site, including threats of radioactive contamination reaching area drinking and irrigation water aquifers downstream, as well as the risk of groudwater reaching HLRW containers and degrading them;
(s) risks of high burnup irradiated nuclear fuel degradation and failure.
(8) See Beyond Nuclear's comments, prepared in early 2017, in opposition to WCS/ISP's CISF, during NRC's environmental scoping phase. NRC has largely to entirely ignored most to all of these previous comments, so we need to repeat them loudly and forcefully again now!
(9) See Public Citizen and NIRS action alert webform comments, from Feb. 28, 2017, as examples you can use to write your own. Again, NRC has largely to entirely ignored most to all of these previous comments (despite being submitted by tens of thousands of people, via the Public Citizen and NIRS webforms!), so we need to repeat them loudly and forcefully again now!
(10) Environmental justice. WCS/ISP is targeting extreme west Texas, right on the southeastern New Mexico border, where many of the surrounding communities in the area are majority Hispanic, or else nearly so. As but one example, the town of Eunice, NM, just several miles from WCS across the TX state line, is nearly majority Hispanic. The Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation (itself previously targeted for a CISF!) is not all that far away from WCS to the west. While a lot of money has been made in the Permian Basin from fossil fuel and nuclear industries, that wealth is not equitably distributed nor shared with the local population, many of whom are low income and/or people of color. Thus, there are very significant environmental justice issues of low income and/or people of color communities in southeastern NM and west TX being targeted for these dumps, both WCS/ISP and Holtec/ELEA's CISFs. As shown by this remarkable map by Deborah Reade of Santa Fe, NM, southeastern NM, and the rest of the state of NM, bears a tremendous pollution burden from these fossil fuel (concentrated in the Permian Basin, in NM's southeastern corner) and nuclear (throughout NM, but with a particular concentration of significant polluting facilities in/near the southeastern corner) and other hazardous industries. As WCS is immediately upon NM's border, and even upstream in terms of water flow direction, this WCS/ISP CISF is an unacceptable additional environmental justice burden on NM. But of course, being in west TX, it is so too for TX! After all, WCS is already a national so-called "low" level radioactive waste dump. Now they want to add HLRW on top of that. This is a disproportionate burden on one community and one state, a violation of EJ.
NRC's willful blindness to the EJ impacts of the essentially co-located Holtec/ELEA, NM and WCS/ISP, TX CISF proposals is itself an outrage. NRC's own behavior is an EJ violation, as are both CISF proposals to begin with!
(11) See July 2019 posts at Beyond Nuclear's Centralized Storage website section, for additional ideas for comments you can make to NRC in opposition to the WCS/ISP CISF. NRC ASLB oral argument pre-hearings were held in Midland, TX in early July. See press statements by dump opponents, resulting press coverage, licensing interventions, etc.
Additional sample comments and talking points you can use to write your own for submission to NRC by the current November 3, 2020 deadline, will be posted here ASAP. See Updates, posted below.
As posted above at the top of this entry:
Submit your public comments, here:
The NRC will accept email comments at: WCS_CISF_EIS@nrc.gov.
*The Docket ID, NRC-2016-0231, should be included in the subject line of comments.*
Comments can also be submitted at http://www.regulations.gov or sent by snail mail to: Office of Administration, Mail Stop: TWFN-7-A60M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, ATTN: Program Management, Announcements and Editing Staff.
See the DEIS posted online, here:
Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the WCS/ISP high-level radioactive waste dump proposal for Texas: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2012/ML20122A220.pdf
The current public comment deadline is November 3, 2020.
Finally, you can learn more about CISFs at our Centralized Storage website section.
And you can learn more about the risks of high-level radioactive waste transportation -- Mobile Chernobyls, Dirty Bombs on Wheels, Floating Fukushimas, Mobile X-ray Machines That Can't Be Turned Off -- at our Waste Transportation website section. This includes the risks of severe accidents (such as long-duration, high-temperature fires; long-duration, deep-underwater submersions; high-speed crashes into immovable objects; crushing loads; etc.), as well as intentional attacks, and even the gamma- and neutron-radiation emissions from "routine" or "incident-free" shipments.
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