Beyond Nuclear's public comment #3, re: NRC's Holtec/ELEA CISF DEIS, Docket ID NRC-2018-0052 -- re: complexity and risk of multiple required cask-to-cask canister transfers

Submitted via: <>

Dear NRC Staff,

The inner canisters will have to be transferred (from on-site storage dry casks, to radiation shielding/transfer casks, to transport/shipping casks, again to transfer casks, then to CISF storage pits; and then, if and when high-level radioactive wastes are exported to a permanent repository, the reverse process) multiple times. Nowhere in the NRC DEIS is this complexity, and high risk for something to go wrong, reflected, admitted, nor analyzed adequately.

Just the stage of lowering the inner canisters into the CISF storage pits (VVMs, Vertical Ventilated Modules, in Holtec parlance) could prove damaging and dangerous. As revealed by a whistle-blower at San Onofre nuclear power plant in California in August 2018, lowering a 50-ton, fully-loaded canister into a storage pit there nearly led to an 18-foot free-fall drop, due to human error. If not for the whistle-blower's courageous revelation, this incident may never have been made publicly known. He was made to pay for his courage with his job. But Southern California Edison would very likely not have ever revealed it. Same for Holtec. Same for any contractors or sub-contractors involved. And NRC either didn't even know it had happened, or else was also complicit in the cover up.

Another example of potential for damage and danger also comes from San Onofre. A large number of inner canisters have been significantly gouged while being lowered into their storage pits. This significantly risks early failure of these containers, as degradation and corrosion now has a weak link to attack. Through-wall cracks are all the more likely, all the sooner, because of this gouging, resulting from Holtec's dangerously poor design of the UMAX system.

Making matters worse, NRC is not even requiring Dry Transfer Systems (DTS), neither at the nuclear power plant origin sites, nor at Holtec/ELEA's CISF, nor anywhere in between. So there will be no way to deal with failed fuel or containers, as well as leaks or contamination, if and when they occur.

Expert witness Bob Alvarez, serving Holtec/ELEA opponents, 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 use at the Yucca dump. This would require dividing up the contents of 10,000 containers at Holtec/ELEA's CISF into 80,000 smaller TADs. Nowhere is this addressed in the Holtec ER, nor the NRC DEIS. And yet both Holtec and NRC assume Yucca will be the ultimate dump, itself an outrage, as Ian Zabarte, Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Indians, and secretary of the Native Community Action Council, testified on the June 23, 2020 webinar/call-in public comment meeting. He made clear the Western Shoshone hold title to Yucca Mountain, as acknowledged by the U.S. government when it signed the "peace and friendship" Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863.

That Holtec container to TAD container repackaging process described above will have significant risks and potential impacts for health, environment, and safety, and yet could not be done without a DTS. The entire complex, high risk subject matter area is missing from NRC's Holtec 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.

I submit these comments on behalf of our members and supporters in New Mexico, as well as along the transport routes in most states who would be impacted by this dangerous, unnecessary proposal.

Please acknowledge receipt of these comments. Thank you.

Beyond Nuclear public comment #2, re: NRC's Holtec/ELEA CISF DEIS, Docket ID NRC-2018-0052 -- e: large impacts/risks of high-level radioactive waste transportation, lack of shipment route maps

Submitted via <Holtec-CISFEIS@nrc.gov>

Dear NRC Staff,

On behalf of our members and supporters in New Mexico, and beyond throughout the Lower 48 states along transport routes (road, rail, and/or waterway) that would be used to haul irradiated nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive waste (such as Greater-Than-Class-C so-called "low" level radioactive waste to the Holtec/ELEA CISF), we protest NRC's woefully inadequate, to nearly non-existent, treatment of highly radioactive waste transport risks central to the proposed scheme.

This violates the long-established legal requirement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that NRC take a "hard look" at the Holtec CISF proposal, including its inextricably linked high-risk transportation component, impacting most states in the Lower 48.

NRC cites a 2008 Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed Yucca Mountain, NV dump targeting Western Shoshone Indian land. NRC cites the 2008 DOE document as part of its excuse for not having to do a Holtec-specific transport analysis in 2020 in its own DEIS for the Holtec/ELEA CISF.

In 2017, Fred Dilger, utilizing that same 2008 DOE document, on behalf of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, published a set of route maps, showing road and rail routes admitted by DOE as the most likely to be used to haul highly radioactive wastes to Yucca Mountain, NV.

Dilger's route maps are posted online under the year 2017, here:

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/trans.htm

It should be noted that the further away from the American Southwest such shipments originate, the more similar or even identical the routes for hauling highly radioactive wastes, whether bound for NV or NM.

To round out the complete picture, DOE also published barge route maps in its Feb. 2002 Final EIS on Yucca. Beyond Nuclear has posted these barge route maps for potential barge shipments into ports on bays, rivers, harbors, lakes, and seacoasts across the country, at the following online link:

http://www.beyondnuclear.org/waste-transportation/2017/6/29/potential-barge-routes-on-us-surface-waters-to-ship-high-lev.html

For its part, Holtec's Environment Report accounts for routes to NM from only four of our country's total of 131 atomic reactors (95 still operating, 2 under construction, 34 permanently shutdown) -- three at San Onofre, CA and one at Maine Yankee -- but NRC's DEIS didn't even include this sole, inadequate map! (See Holtec's solitary map, linked here (Holtec Environment Report, Figure 4.9.1., TRANSPORTATION ROUTES FOR SNF). Compare it to this 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 Holtec DEIS: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2017/ymroutes17.png ).

NRC's DEIS, and Holtec's ER, essentially excluding the high risks of transport, and not even being transparent about transport routes, 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.

Please acknowledge receipt of these comments. Thank you.

Report: Company Decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Plant Under Criminal Investigation

As reported by WBUR.

Holtec International, owner of the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant, and conducting its decommissioning and high-level radioactive waste management, has also proposed a highly controversial consolidated interim storage facility for commercial irradiated nuclear fuel in New Mexico.

Beyond Nuclear's public comment #1 on NRC's Holtec/ELEA CISF DEIS, Docket ID NRC-2018-0052 -- 40-year timeframe is inappropriately, arbitrarily, and capriciously short scope

Submitted via <Holtec-CISFEIS@nrc.gov>

Dear NRC Staff,

NRC's time-limited focus on just 40 years of "temporary" or "interim storage" is inappropriately, arbitrarily and capriciously short, especially given Holtec's own admission in its license application to NRC that "interim storage" could persist for 120 years; in response to a Request for Information from DOE (the U.S. Department of Energy), Holtec admitted a CISF could operate for 300 years; and in NRC's own 2014 Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule and Generic EIS, the agency acknowledged away-from-reactor ISFSIs (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations) could go on indefinitely (that is, "forevermore," à la the classic book by that title: Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America, by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, 1986).

Institutional control could well 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, bioconcentrate up the food chain, and harm people down the generations. This would of course be a LARGE impact (even an EXTRA LARGE impact, as a representative from the Nuclear Issues Study Group in Albuquerque, NM, put it at the June 23, 2020 public comment webinar/call-in session), that should be acknowledged in the DEIS.

NRC Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane attached a note to her vote on the Continued Storage Rule and GEIS, warning that loss of institutional control will remain an ongoing risk. How true. The risk will only increase over time.

This is made all the worse by the bait and switch the NRC has pulled on the American people, yet again. In its Continued Storage Rule and GEIS, NRC expressed "nuclear waste confidence" (the previous name for the Continued Storage Rule was, after all, the Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule), whether long-term storage took place on-site at reactors, or away-from-reactor, as at a Consolidated Interim Storage Facility such as Holtec/ELEA's in NM.

But NRC's nuclear waste confidence was based on such things as the presence of Dry Transfer Systems (DTS), needed in order to safely repackage failing or failed containers, while also protecting worker and public health, and the environment. But NRC has not required a DTS at the Holtec/ELEA CISF. Both Holtec and NRC have indicated such a DTS could be built and operated later, as needed, perhaps many decades into the future, post CISF-opening.

Of course, this does not account for the need for a DTS in real time, in an emergency. A DTS would very likely take a long period of time to build, at huge expense. This could not be done in a hurry. But a high-level radioactive waste emergency could unfold in a hurry, such as a leaking, damaged, or otherwise failing or failed container showing up at the Holtec/ELEA CISF in NM.

Holtec has responded with its "Start Clean/Stay Clean" policy, that problematic containers will simply be "Returned to Sender." This is patently absurd, in the case of leaking, contaminated, damaged, or otherwise failed or failing containers. Depending on the route of the "Return to Sender" shipment, literally millions of Americans could be put at risk, in multiple states, during the second leg of the nonsensical, and now highly dangerous, round-trip. Such a dangerous shipment could easily violate not only NRC regulations, but multiple federal laws.

If the problem shipment happened to have come from Fermi 2 in MI, that would be a 3,000 mile round-trip. If the problem shipment happened to come from Maine Yankee, that would be a 2,300-mile one-way trip, so a 4,600-mile round-trip.

Of course, such a problem container could arrive as soon as the Holtec/ELEA CISF were to open, and at any time after that. Without an operating DTS, the Holtec/ELEA CISF would be caught flat-footed, if and when a problem cask arrives.

Of course, problems can, and likely will, develop with containers, even if they first arrive at the CISF in good shape; age-related degradation over long enough periods of time is guaranteed on Planet Earth, subject as it is to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Things fall apart. Entropy wins in the end. Rust never sleeps. Nor other forms of corrosion and degradation, afflicting all aspects of the CISF, from metal to concrete and everything in between.

If a DTS is never built at the Holtec/ELEA CISF, then catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity into the environment are guaranteed, over a long enough time period, due to container failure. Absent a DTS, NRC's Continued Storage Rule, or Nuclear Waste Confidence, is a nuclear waste con game, perpetrated on the American people. Absence of a DTS just means that loss of institutional control is guaranteed to arrive all that much sooner at the Holtec/ELEA CISF.

The 40-year time horizon in NRC's Holtec/ELEA CISF DEIS is thus inappropriately, arbitrarily, and capriciously short.

I request an acknowledgement that you have received this public comment, made on behalf of Beyond Nuclear's members and supporters in NM, as well as along the transport routes that would be used to haul high-level radioactive waste bound for the Holtec/ELEA CISF, through most states.

[Holtec] Nuclear waste site [in NM] debated during federal hearing

As reported by the Carlsbad Current Argus:

Nuclear waste site debated during federal hearing

State of New Mexico says nuclear waste project poses disproportionate risk, locals supportive

The draft environmental impact statement issued in March, found the project would have "minimal" impact on the environment.