Environmental coalition defends its legal appeal, seeks to block Fermi 3 proposed new reactor in Michigan

Terry Lodge, legal counsel for the environmental coalition resisting Fermi 3

An environmental coalition, including Beyond Nuclear, is entering its 10th year of resistance (2008-2017) against Detroit Edison's proposed new Fermi Unit 3 reactor in southeast Michigan on the Great Lakes shoreline.

On Dec. 23rd, Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge filed a Reply Brief, in defense of a legal appeal originally filed in October, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second highest court in the land, just below the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Reply rebuts challenges to the appeal brought by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Detroit Edison (DTE).

The appeal challenges NRC's exclusion of the transmission line corridor from the Environmental Impact Statement, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The appeal also challenges DTE's violations of NRC's quality assurance (QA) regulations (Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates, Inc. serves as the coalition's QA expert).

More.

U.S. looks for potential issues linked to falsified French nuclear documents

As reported by Reuters, and Tweeted by Scott Stapf of the Hastings Group: Nine U.S. reactors linked to French scandal over falsified documents over nuclear parts.

The Reuters article mentions one U.S. nuclear power plant by name:

One U.S. plant with parts from Le Creusot is Dominion Resource Inc's Millstone station in Connecticut, which has had a pressurizer from the French forge in service in Unit 2 since 2006.

Dominion spokesman Ken Holt said that when Areva manufactured the pressurizer for Millstone they performed some additional heat treatment, but did not tell Dominion.

Another U.S. nuclear power plant that may be implicated, according to the article, is FirstEnergy's Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania:

Another plant that may be affected is FirstEnergy Corp's Beaver Valley station in Pennsylvania. Beaver Valley has steam generators and reactor vessel heads manufactured by Spain's Equipos Nucleares SA, or ENSA, which FirstEnergy said may contain some subcomponents from Le Creusot.

The article also reports:

There are nine U.S. plants with parts from Le Creusot, but the NRC did not immediately name them.

No explanation is given for why NRC will not name th implicated nuclear power plants, other than the obvious -- to save the plants bad publicity, and increased public and media scrutiny. 

Such a lack of transparency and accountability by the NRC -- an agency largely to entirely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate -- is a key part of the collusion that the Japanese Parliament concluded in 2012 was the root cause of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in that country. But such collusion exists in spades in the United States, as well. 

The Wall Street Journal has also reported on this story, in an article entitled "Coverup at French Nuclear Supplier Sparks Global Review."

Mycle Schneider, lead author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal, warning “Likely we have seen only the tip of the iceberg.”

Update on December 22, 2016 by admin

In June 2016, Greenpeace France published a briefing, providing an overview of the international nuclear safety implications of the document falsification and defective equipment scandals. It is entitled "Anomalies and Suspected Falsifications at Areva's Creusot Forge Site."

4 Arrested Protesting AIM Pipeline in New York State

As reported by Democracy Now!:

In New York state, four people were arrested Saturday protesting the construction of Spectra Energy’s AIM pipeline. The pipeline is slated to carry fracked gas only hundreds of feet from the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant and then under the Hudson River. The arrests came as more than 100 activists rallied at a construction site in Verplanck, New York. The pipeline has faced years of resistance from residents in New York state and Rhode Island. [Also see updates and alerts re: the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, at Beyond Nuclear's Human Rights website section.]

Yet another oil spill at Indian Point, into the Hudson River

Riverkeeper map showing risks to the Hudson River, New York City, and beyond, from Indian Point.As reported by Nuclear Street, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered two state agencies to investigate the latest oil spill at Entergy's Indian Point nuclear power plant, located on the banks of the Hudson River, not far upstream from New York City.

The article reports:

Since 2011, there have been over 40 spills and unexpected shutdown events at the Indian Point Nuclear Reactor, which as been criticized repeatedly by Gov. Cuomo, who has said the plant, run by Entergy Nuclear Operations Inc. and just 24 miles north of New York City, is too close to a major population center to allow for a reasonable evacuation process in the event of a significant emergency.

Commemorating the Fermi 1 meltdown, 50 years later

John G. Fuller's iconic 1975 book "We Almost Lost Detroit" helped open many eyes to the dangers of nuclear powerNext Wednesday, Beyond Nuclear is joining with grassroots environmental allies in southeast Michigan to mark the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 5, 1966 partial meltdown of the infamous Fermi Unit 1 plutonium breeder reactor located on the shore of Lake Erie. In the form of our "Freeze Our Fukushimas" and "Got KI?" campaigns, the lessons that should have been learned from this close call with catastrophe, that endangered the Great Lakes, and countless numbers of people downwind and downstream, will be applied to resisting ongoing operations at Fermi 2 (a Fukushima Daiichi twin design), as well as seeking to block the proposed new Fermi 3 reactor.  More