The Mobile Chernobyl mock nuke waste cask, a full size replica of a truck shipping container, shown in front of the State Capitol in Jefferson City, MO during a cross-country educational tourAs reported by Hannah Northey of E&E on Nov. 22nd ("Senate panel to take up repository bill next month"), U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the Chair and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) Committee, had threatened to bring S. 1240, the so-called "Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013," up for a committee vote in December 2013. Dec. 19th was floated as a date for a committee mark up. But in recent days, it has become known that any action has been postponed into next year.
However, vigilance is still required. Thanks to all of you who have contacted your U.S. Senators to express opposition to S. 1240, the "Nuclear Waste Administration Act." If you haven't contacted your two U.S. Senators yet, please do so now. You can call them via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
If you have contacted your U.S. Senators already, thank you! But there is more you can do. Please continue to let them know you oppose this bill, and urge everyone you know to do the same.
Check to see if your U.S. Senator is on the ENR Committee. If so, consider organizing your friends and colleagues, and request to meet with your Senator during their holiday break back home. Your meeting with them could make a huge difference on their vote re: S. 1240! If a meeting with your Senator is refused, follow up with a request to meet with your Senator's staff on this issue.
If neither of your Senators serve on the ENR Committee, you can still urge them to contact their colleagues who do. Your Senators should urge their Senate colleagues on the ENR Committee to vote against S. 1240, in order to protect the interests of constituents in your state, including yourself!
See below for more background information.
BACKGROUND
Along with Wyden and Murkowski, U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the Chair and Ranking Member on the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Water Appropriations, are co-sponsors of S. 1240. Critics have dubbed the "Gang of 4" U.S. Senators' proposed legislation the "Mobile Chernobyl/Parking Lot Dump" bill. It would represent a huge giveaway to the already filthy rich nuclear power industry, and coup for its lobbyists, if they get away with the radiologically-risky, multi-billion dollar boondoggle.
Beyond Nuclear provided extensive background on the dangerous bill last June, when it was first introduced. Despite calling for public comments on their draft legislation, the "Gang of 4" effectively ignored environmental and public interest concerns registered by the thousands. Shamefully, the bill, as introduced, was actually significantly worse than the initial "discussion draft," an indication of nuclear lobbyists' shady "ways and means" behind closed doors on Capitol Hill!
S. 1240 further revved its engines on July 30th, at an ENR Committee hearing.
It is urgent that you contact your two U.S. Senators, and urge that they put the brakes on this "Mobile Chernobyl/Parking Lot Dump" bill, and stop it dead in its tracks. They can be contacted via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
If enacted, it would launch large numbers of risky high-level radioactive waste trucks, trains, and/or barges. The unprecedented shipping campaign would accomplish exactly nothing in terms of protecting public health, safety, and the environment. Quite to the contrary, it would bring high-level radioactive waste, in shipping containers vulnerable to severe accidents or terrorist attacks, through the heart of major metropolitan areas, such as Chicago. For more information on high-level radioactive waste transport risks, see NIRS's "Mobile Chernobyl/Fukushima Freeways" website section (such as the HLRW barges on waterways -- the Great Lakes, rivers, sea coasts -- sub-section, dated Sept. 28, 2004, which could now be dubbed "Floating Fukushimas"!).
Scores of environmental groups across the country have consistently opposed centralized interim storage, "de-linked" from progress on a permanent deep geological repository, for just such reasons, for a long time. It clearly risks the "temporary" parking lot dumps becoming de facto permanent, if and when the next deep geological repository is cancelled, just as the Yucca Mountain dump was (wisely so, given the geological unsuitability of the Nevada site, the environmental injustice of dumping high-level radioactive waste on Western Shoshone Indian treaty lands, etc.).
S. 1240 would create a radioactive waste shell game on the roads, rails, and waterways of many/most states, all in an effort to remove a major liability, cost, and PR headache from nuclear utilities' ledgers, and transfer them squarely onto the backs of U.S. taxpayers.
The recent federal court decision, ending DOE's collection of the meager 1/10th of a cent per kilowatt-hour fee on nuclear electricity ratepayers' bills, means that once the money currently remaining in the Nuclear Waste Fund is spent, there will be no more. Thus, those costs will eventually fall entirely on federal taxpayers. These costs could easily mount into the tens, and even hundreds, of billions of dollars over time. No other industry, besides nuclear power, enjoys such public subsidies.
The bill seeks to open a "pilot consolidated interim storage site" by 2021. HLRW from "orphaned" or "stranded" sites -- permanently closed atomic reactors -- would be given priority in the shipping queue. The supposed justification for this is to return decommissioned nuclear power plant sites to productive, economic use. This ignores the fact that those sites are still radioactively contaminated, despite so-called "clean up." It also ignores community groups who oppose the immoral idea of dumping their community's problems onto someone else.
The top targets for the "pilot" parking lot dump include: already contaminated and/or radiologically-burdened U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites, such as Savannah River Site (SRS), SC; Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), NM; and Idaho National Lab (INL); Native American lands, such as the tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in UT, or a number of unnamed reservations which the Nuclear Energy Institute has claimed, for several years, to be in secretive negotiations with; and/or operating nuclear power plant sites, such as the co-located Exelon Dresden nuclear power plant/GE-Hitachi independent spent fuel storage pool, just southwest of Chicago, already "home" to 3,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste.
The bill largely guts any notion of "consent-based" siting, by allowing for potential interim storage sites to be characterized, and even declared suitable, before "consent" is even sought from the community. The momentum already built, coupled with lucrative, promised incentives, would make it very difficult for communities of color, or those in dire economic straits, to resist. The nuclear power establishment in industry and government has repeatedly violated environmental justice in this way for decades, and appears poised to do so yet again!
S. 1240 also expresses a preference that the "pilot" interim storage site become the full-scale interim storage site by 2025, and even then the permanent deep geologic repository (DGR, or dumpsite) by 2048. No limit to how much HLRW could be rushed to the interim storage site(s), nor how much HLRW could be dumped at the first DGR, could mean that a single site would become the "nuclear sacrifice area" for the entire country, as was previously attempted at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In fact, there are no safeguards in the legislation that would protect Yucca from again being targeted. And, a supposedly "interim storage" site appears all-too-likely to become a de facto permanent "disposal" site, whether that be by abandonment on the surface, or burial underground. This risk is made all the worse by the bill's lack of a requirement for any progress on permanent disposal during the first 10 years of interim storage facility operations.
What S. 1240 also does not call for is Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS), which is what hundreds of environmental and public interest groups representing all 50 states have called for, time and time again, for well over a decade now. In addition, more and more groups are saying "STOP MAKING IT!", as at the recent U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) nuke waste con game public comment meetings around the country.
To the contrary, Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) has attempted to justify her legislative proposals as essential for paving the way for SMRs (so-called Small Modular Reactors) to be built in the U.S. (to the tune of billions of dollars of federal taxpayer expense, in the form of RDD -- research, development, and demonstration -- subsidies, the subcommittee chair for such appropriations forgot to mention).
As reported by Beyond Nuclear on Jan. 16, 2013:
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, has praised the Obama administration's call for centralized interim storage. Revealingly, she expressed her support in the context of a pro-nuclear expansion agenda: "Delaying the creation of a long-term policy on nuclear waste would simply make the problems more complex and dangerous -- particularly with the development of a generation of new small modular reactors." (emphasis added)
In fact, so too did President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. If the name of the commission wasn't bad enough, its behavior, beginning in 2010, and final report in 2012, made clear that the top priority for "solving the high-level radioactive waste problem" was to pave the way for a nuclear power expansion. Despite claiming to be open and welcoming of public input, the Blue Ribbon Commission summarily ignored the thousands of public comments submitted over its two year existence. While the Blue Ribbon Commission was forced to listen to oral comments made at its numerous meetings around the country, it was later learned that written comments had not even been read before the BRC submitted its final report to Congress. Even worse, the website archive of those written comments, and even the transcripts and recordings of the public meetings themselves, became inaccessible on the BRC's abandoned website, making all that hard-won information unobtainable by the public. The BRC website was restored when the problem was called to DOE's attention by environmental watchdogs, but under the telling name "Cyber Cemetery."
The Senate ENR Committee has behaved similarly. In early 2013, it called for public input on its "Discussion Draft" of S. 1240. 2,500 comments were submitted, including by Beyond Nuclear, but were summarily ignored. The final draft of S. 1240 was worse than the discussion draft! Further changes for the worse can be expected in S. 1240, due to the corrupting influence of nuclear industry lobbyists and their campaign contributions.
An infrared photo of a high-level radioactive waste rail shipment. The high temperature of such shipments, however, is the least of our worries. A severe accident, or attack, involving such a shipment could breach the container, leading to disastrous releases of hazardous radioactivity. This is true for solid irradiated fuel shipments, but all the more so for unprecedented, unanalyzed liquid HLRW truck transports.Grassroots opposition is mounting against a proposal to conduct the unprecedented transportation of liquid high-level radioactive wastes (HLRWs) from Chalk River, Ontario, Canada to Savannah River Site, South Carolina, U.S.A. Although some 2,500 to 3,000 shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel in solid form have occurred in the U.S. since the 1940s, never before has liquid HLRW been shipped. The risks of a disastrous environmental release due to a severe accident would be even higher for liquid shipments than for solid shipments.
January 15, 2014
