Congressman Kucinich leads successful opposition to new national park glorifying the Manhattan Project

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)On Thursday, September 20th, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinch (D-OH, pictured left) sponsored a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill during the Coalition Against Nukes events in Washington, D.C. Rep. Kucinich thanked those gathered for working on an issue "that is bigger than all of us." During his talk, he focused on the whitewash, by FirstEnergy and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, of containment cracking at the Davis-Besse atomic reactor, just upwind of his congressional district on northern Ohio's Lake Erie shoreline, as representative of the dangerous state of decay of the nuclear power industry in the U.S. And he had some kind words for Beyond Nuclear: "...I want to thank my friends at Beyond Nuclear like Kevin Kamps who have been doing a fantastic job at citizen oversight over Davis-Besse."

Later that same night, Rep. Kucinich helped lead the successful effort to block H.R. 5987, which proposed creating a new national park to glorify the Manhattan Project, which culminated with the August 1945 dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.

At an NRC review meeting in Painesville, OH on Sept. 26 regarding FirstEnergy's entire nuclear fleet, Rep. Kucinich lambasted safety lapses at not only Davis-Besse, but also Perry nuclear power plant northeast of Cleveland. He asked: "Why does the NRC think FirstEnergy’s past record justifies an extension of their current operating licenses at their nuclear power plants?” As he had done at a U.S. House hearing in December 2011, Rep. Kucinich submitted for the record a Beyond Nuclear report documenting Davis-Besse's numerous near-disasters.

Taliban threaten nuclear facilities in Pakistan

The Global Security Newswire conveys a report from Pakistan's Express Tribune  that the Taliban is poised, with up to four car bombs, to attack a military uranium processing complex in Pakistan. The threat comes just weeks after an hours-long gun battle at a Pakistani air force installation, rumored to house nuclear weapons.

Government Memo Slams Bechtel for Malfeasance, Safety Violations at Hanford Nuclear Site

Hanford tanks under constructionHanford Challenge has made public a scathing U.S. Department of Energy internal memo detailing Bechtel's long history of incompetence, misleading the government, overcharging, and unsafe designs related to the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The facility is a decade behind schedule and 250% over budget, with a current, yet still climbing, price tag of $13 billion. The WTP is supposed to vitrify (glassify) liquid high-level radioactive wastes, byproducts from reprocessing military irradiated nuclear fuel for weapons-grade plutonium extraction for use in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The memo, written by a high-ranking DOE director, urges that Bechtel be removed as the Design Authority for the WTP, warning that Bechtel “is not competent to complete their role.”

Hanford Challenge Executive Director, Tom Carpenter, posits: “the leaked memo puts the Waste Treatment Plant’s woes into sharp relief. This memo details exhaustive and disturbing evidence of why Bechtel should be terminated from this project and subject to an independent investigation. We already knew of Bechtel’s record of suppressing its own engineers’ concerns and retaliating against whistleblowers, and now we see evidence that exhibits a shocking and inexcusable lack of attention to safety for both workers and the public.”

Hanford Challenge is a member group of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), as is Beyond Nuclear.

The news comes just two weeks after Hanford Challenge revealed that the first double-shelled liquid high-level radioactive waste tank has been documented as leaking at Hanford.

Save the dates: "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High: Ending the Nuclear Age," Chicago, December 1-3, 2012

Please save the dates, on the first weekend in December, for a gathering in Chicago, Illinois, to mark the 70th year since Enrico Fermi first split the atom -- in a squash court, under the football stadium at the University of Chicago -- as part of the top secret Manhattan Project, on December 2, 1942. Since then, no permanent, safe location or technology has ever been found to isolate even the first cupful of radioactive waste from the biosphere. And yet we continue to generate more and more -- a mountain of waste 70 years high.

The goal of the Friday evening to Sunday afternoon conference is to educate, inspire, and activate. Diverse expert speakers will be featured, on a range of subject matter, including: radioactive waste; the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe; the inextricable link between nuclear weapons and nuclear power; degraded old and proposed new atomic reactor risks; the Atomic Age's impacts on human beings, and resistance to it; and the way forward without nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

The event will also feature: film screenings/discussions; real-time linkage to, and interaction with, remote participants in Hiroshima, Japan and Takoma Park, Maryland; a commemoration ceremony at the Henry Moore Sculpture (the very spot where Fermi first split the atom); and a possible field trip to Red Gate Woods (a suburban forest preserve, where Fermi's radioactive wastes are buried, next to a bicycle path, under a mound of dirt).

In addition to an excellent networking opportunity, the event will help participants get up to speed on various nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and radioactive waste issues, so we can better fend off the nuclear establishment's expansion plans next year, after the presidential and congressional elections.

For more information, contact David Kraft at Nuclear Energy Information Service in Chicago (neis@neis.org; 773-342-7650), or Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear (kevin@beyondnuclear.org; 301-270-2209x1).

For more background on the radioactive waste issue, see Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet, "A Mountain of Waste Seventy Years High" (see its cover, at left), and visit the Radioactive Waste section of the Beyond Nuclear website.

Opposition mounts to moving atomic bomb material across the country

Nuclear watchdogs are fighting a proposal to ship tons of plutonium to the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, including the cores of nuclear warheads. The plutonium "pits," as they are known,  would be dismantled at the aging and structurally questionable lab atop an earthquake fault zone. A raging wild far also threatened the boundaries of the lab last year blackening surrounding hills. The US Department of Energy is currently holding hearings over the proposal to transport plutonium from the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons center in South Carolina to Los Alamos, almost clear across the country. Some of the waste may also be dumped at the WIPP plant in Carlsbad, NM. The "surplus" plutonium would then be shipped back across the country to a proposed MOX fuel fabrication plant where is would be mixed into civilian reactor fuel. This not only crosses the line between the military and civilian nuclear sectors but presents safety and disposal risks. No US reactor is designed to use the radiologically hotter MOX fuel and there is no current disposal site at all, let alone one adapted to taking waste fuel from MOX reactors. At a recent action around the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Days commemorations, six activists were arrested at the gates of the lab. (Pictured, l to r: Benjamin Abbott, Catherine Euler and Cathie Sullivan.