"Attorney Generals Fight for Public Access in Nuclear Issues"

Environmental coalition attorney Terry Lodge of Toledo speaks out against Davis-Besse's 20-year license extension at a press conference in Oak Harbor, OH in August 2012An article written by Roger Witherspoon, "Attorney Generals Fight for Public Access in Nuclear Issues," begins:

"The Attorney Generals of New York and Vermont have joined the fight against California’s San Onofre Nuclear power plant in an effort to stop federal regulators from erasing all record of a judicial ruling that the public has a right to intervene before major amendments are granted to an operating license.

If the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants the request of their staff to vacate the ruling of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board and expunge the record, it will eliminate a precedent that affects power plant operations and regulatory practices around the country. In particular, it will affect the six-year fight in New York to shut the Indian Point power plants 25 miles north of New York City; and Vermont’s ongoing effort to shut the Vermont Yankee power plant.

The cross country battle now being waged by NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell is an uphill fight against one of the most powerful professional staffs in the US government and an agency that has a unique view of its own independence.

“The Commission has stated that it is not bound by judicial practice, including that of the United States Supreme Court,” stated Schneiderman and Sorrell in a brief filed June 24 with the NRC challenging the staff request...". Continue reading Roger Witherspoon's article here.

The next proceeding most likely to be immediately and directly impacted by the survival or demise of Friends of the Earths' (FOE) San Onofre precedent involves the replacement of steam generators at FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company's (FENOC) problem-plagued Davis-Besse atomic reactor, located on the Lake Erie shoreline in Oak Harbor, Ohio just east of Toledo. A bi-national coalition of environmental groups -- Beyond Nuclear, Citizen Environment Coalition of Southwestern Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, and the Sierra Club -- have challenged FENOC's attempt to avoid transparent, open, and publicly accessible license amendment proceedings, by arguing the new steam generators are "like-for-like" replacements of the old ones.

But the coalition's expert witness, Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer at Fairewinds Associates, Inc., has documented numerous major changes from the degraded old to the new replacement steam generators. Gundersen also serves as FOE's expert witness at San Onofre. Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge (photo, above left) serves as the coalition's legal counsel.

An Atomic Safety (sic) and Licensing Board (ASLB) panel heard pre-hearing oral arguments regarding the environmental interveners' standing, as well as the merits of its arguments, on July 24th. The ASLB indicated it would rule on the admissibility of the coalition's intervention petition this month.

Lodge also represents a second bi-national environmental coalition (Beyond Nuclear, CEA, DWM, and the Green Party of Ohio) intervening against FENOC's proposed 20-year license extension at Davis-Besse. The proceeding provided another example of the absurb lengths to which a nuclear utility and the NRC staff will go to try to block "public access in nuclear issues." Both FENOC and NRC staff argued that because CEA's home base was a mere 127 feet beyond an arbitrary 50-mile cut off point, their standing the proceeding should be rejected. The ASLB overseeing that proceeding, thankfully, did not agree.

However, that ASLB (and/or the NRC Commission above it) has rejected all of the interveners' contentions but one: a successful lawsuit brought against NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence policy has resulted in a court-ordered requirement for an environmental impact statement by NRC regarding the risks of long-term, on-site storage of high-level radioactive wastes. The EIS will take two years to complete (NRC had previously admitted it would take seven years to complete, but is racing through the process), during which time the Davis-Besse license extension cannot be finalized. Davis-Besse's original 40-year license expires on Earth Day (April 22), 2017.

Speaking out against foreign ownership of U.S. atomic reactors

Recently elected to the U.S. Senate, Ed Markey (D-MA) has watchdogged the nuclear industry for four decades while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, he has spokean out against NRC weakening its rules on foreign ownership of U.S. atomic reactors.For several long years, an environmental coalition comprised of NIRS, Beyond Nuclear, Public Citizen, and Southern Maryland CARES co-intervened against the proposed new atomic reactor at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay, and won. The death blow in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing proceeding was dealt by a contention against foreign ownership of U.S. atomic reactors, argued pro se by NIRS executive director Michael Mariotte. Baltimore-based Constellation Energy abandoned the project, leaving French government-owned Electricite de France (EDF) holding the bag with 100% ownership stakes, a clear violation of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Reading the writing on the walls, no other U.S. nuclear utility stepped forward to fill the void. The project was doomed, and ultimately defeated.

As NIRS states in its press release below, "Earlier this week, EDF announced that it is permanently leaving the U.S. nuclear power market and will no longer attempt to build new reactors here."

NIRS went on: "The issue has come up again at the South Texas Nuclear Project, where intervening organizations have charged that the two nuclear reactors proposed there would be owned, controlled and dominated by the Japanese company Toshiba. The NRC staff agrees with the intervenors and issued a letter stating that a license cannot be granted for the project. An Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has scheduled a hearing on the matter in October."

In fact, not only Toshiba of Japan, but also its supposed competitor, Hitachi of Japan, as well as Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), and finally the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), were involved with South Texas Project's proposed new reactors.

(Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps, while on a national anti-nuclear speaking tour of Japan, had the honor and privilege of presenting a coalition letter, signed by scores of U.S. groups, to officials from the Japanese national Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), as well as JBIC. The letter urged METI and JBIC to not invest Japanese taxpayer funds in proposed new atomic reactors in the U.S., as at South Texas Project, due to the financial (not to mention the radiological) risks. The meeting took place in Tokyo, in August 2010. Kevin was there alongside Japanese environmental allies, including from Green Action Kyodo, Citizens Nuclear Information Center Tokyo, and Friends of the Earth Japan. Seven months later, Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe began.)

Shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe began on 3/11/11, the U.S. partner in the new reactors project at South Texas Project, NRG Energy of Princeton, NJ, walked away.

Now NRC is trying to loosen its rules prohibiting foreign ownership of U.S. reactors. NIRS put out the following message:

"[T]oday NIRS submitted lengthy comments to the NRC--supported by 65 other groups [including Beyond Nuclear] -- urging the strengthening of the rules implementing the Atomic Energy Act's ban on foreign ownership, control or domination. The legislative history of the Act shows that Congress intended that no more than about 25% of a reactor can be foreign-owned, but the NRC has moved far away from that over the years. It's time that the agency do what Congress intended and actively prevent foreign control of U.S. nuclear reactors. Here is a press release about the comments; here are the comments themselves (pdf); and here are comments submitted today by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) [photo, above left] (also pdf).

The NRC is planning a webinar on the issue on August 21. Here is the information; contact the NRC if you'd like to speak during this meeting."

EDF seeks to end its U.S. nuclear misadventure

NRC file photo of Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant on the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay in Lusby, MDAs reported by the Baltimore Sun, Exelon/Constellation Nuclear will pay Electricite de France (EDF) a $400 million "special dividend" payment, in exchange for severing partnerships at three U.S. nuclear power plants, totaling five reactors, including Calvert Cliffs Units 1 & 2 on the Chesapeake Bay in Lusby, Maryland (photo, left), and the Ginna and Nine Mile Point Unit 1 & 2 nuclear power plants on the Lake Ontario shore of Upstate, New York. EDF then has the option to sell its 49.99% stake in the nuclear power plants to Exelon between 2016-2022.

When Constellation abandoned the project, not wanting to risk its own skin in the game in exchange for a $7.5 billion federal nuclear loan guarantee offered by the Obama administration, EDF was left holding the bag as majority owner of the proposed new reactor, Calvert Cliffs Unit 3. But foreign ownership is illegal under the Atomic Energy Act, and no other American partner stepped up. The proposed new reactor was to have been a French Areva EPR (1,600 Megawatt-electric Evolutionary Power Reactor). Numerous additional proposed new EPRs have been indefinitely postponed or outright canceled across the U.S. and Canada.

As reported in the article, 'EDF Chief Financial Officer Thomas Piquemal said Tuesday that the deal represents what he hopes is "the last chapter of our U.S. adventure with Constellation," Bloomberg reported.

The Baltimore Business Journal also reported on this story.

As reported by Power Engineering International, EDF's CEO, Henri Proglio, speaking at a news conference in Paris, stated: "The circumstances for the development of nuclear in the US are not favorable at the moment. We are a major player in nuclear, but we are not obsessed by nuclear. Our development in the US will focus on renewable energy – that will be our vector of growth in the US.” (emphasis added)

Mayor, environmentalists declare victory of people power over nuclear power

Sarnia Mayor Mike BradleyAs reported by the Sarnia Observer, the Mayor of Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, Mike Bradley (photo, left), has declared victory in a years-long campaign to block the shipment of radioactive steam generators, by boat on the Great Lakes, from Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Kincardine, Ontario, across the Pacific, to Sweden. 

“It's a real testament to citizen power,” said Bradley, who has been a vocal critic of the move, along with a growing list of Ontario mayors, coalition groups, environmental activists, and U.S. Senators. “We're fighting a very large and powerful organization.”

First Nations, including the Mohawks, as well as hundreds of municipalities in Quebec representing millions of citizens along the targeted shipment route, made the difference for the resistance.

Kay Cumbow, the nuclear power watchdog in Michigan who first discovered the risky shipping scheme through her research, then warned and activated others, has said "Thanks to everyone who wrote letters, signed petitions and helped get the word out about the dangers of this scheme that would have put the Great Lakes at risk, endangered workers as well as communities enroute, and would have put radioactive materials into the global recycled metal supply."

Maude Barlow, national chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, was quoted by the Ottawa Citizen: "This is a huge victory for communities around the Great Lakes...The Great Lakes belong to everyone and communities have a right to say 'no' to any projects that will harm them."

As indicated by Mayor Bradley in a separate Sarnia Observer article, the next big fight against "nuclear madness" brewing at Bruce involves proposals by Ontario Power Generation, the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to bury all of Ontario's so-called "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes -- from 20 atomic reactors across the province -- within a mile of the Lake Huron shoreline. Several communities near Bruce, largely populated by Bruce nuclear workers and in effect company towns, have also volunteered to be considered for a national Canadian high-level radioactive waste dump (for 22 reactors). Ojibwe First Nations, whose land the Bruce Nuclear site is built upon, have expressed grave concerns about the proposed DUDs.

Protesters defeat planned uranium plant in China

From Bloomberg: "Plans to build a uranium-processing facility in China’s southern Guangdong province were scrapped by the local government after more than a thousand people protested against the 37 billion yuan ($6 billion) project last week. The proposed Longwan Industrial Park project won’t be approved “in order to fully respect the opinion of the masses,” the Heshan government said in a statement on its website yesterday. A “social-stability risk assessment” of the proposal that was released for public awareness generated “much opposition,” it said." Read the full article.