Nuclear Hotseat: SPECIAL – St. Louis Nuclear Nightmare

West Lake Landfll, North St. Louis County, MONuclear Hotseat #227: West Lake Radioactive Waste Fire -- Dr. Caldicott, Bob Alvarez, Dawn Chapman

A full length Nuclear Hotseat SPECIAL on the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis - a Manhattan Project-era radioactive waste dump - and the encroaching underground fire less than a quarter mile away.

FEATURED INTERVIEWS:

• The history of the West Lake Landfill nuclear waste with Bob Alvarez, who served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and wrote the landmark November, 2013 report: The West Lake Landfill: A Radioactive Legacy of the Nuclear Arms Race.

• The medical consequences faced by those exposed to the West Lake radioactive waste with Dr. Helen Caldicott, arguably the single most articulate and passionate advocate of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises in the world.   A medical doctor and former instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, she co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility – which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 – and was herself nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. She is the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.

• What it’s like on the ground in the North St. Louis neighborhoods impacted by the radioactive waste with Dawn Chapman, a mother who lives less than two miles from the West Lake Landfill. She Admins the Facebook West Lake Landfill page.

[LISTEN ONLINE]

CALLS NEEDED -- CONTACT INFORMATION

• President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Please include your e-mail address Phone Numbers Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 TTY/TDD Comments: 202-456-6213 Visitors Office: 202-456-2121 Twitter: @POTUS @POTUSPRESSPOOL
• Senator Roy Blunt United States Senate 260 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 201510 (202) 224-5721 Twitter: @RoyBlunt @RoyBluntMO @RoyBluntPress
• Senator Claire McCaskill United States Senate Hart Senate Office Building, Ste. 506 Washington, D.C. 20510 (202) 224-6154 Twitter: @clairecmc
• Congresswoman Ann Wagner United States House of Representatives 435 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 (202) 225-1621 Twitter: @RepAnnWagner
• Congressman William Lacy Clay United States House of Representatives 2418 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 (202) 225-2406 Twitter: @LacyClayMO1
• EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, William Jefferson Clinton Building mail code: 1101A 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20460 Twitter: @EPAGina

"Senate Dems block GOP measure to kill Iran [nuclear] deal"

As reported by Politico:

Senate Democrats on Thursday successfully blocked a measure meant to kill President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, dealing a decisive defeat to Republicans’ attempts to derail the controversial agreement and ensuring its survival.

With a 58-42 vote, Democrats filibustered the disapproval resolution that Republicans and other deal opponents had tried to send to Obama's desk, where it would have been vetoed. But with more than enough support from Democrats to sustain that veto, the fight largely turned to the minutiae of Senate procedure and the suspense of whether Democrats would halt the bill from reaching the White House altogether.

"Energy secretary is urged to end U.S. nuclear fuel program at Savannah River"

As reported by Steven Mufson at the Washington Post:

A group of more than a dozen prominent former arms negotiators and senior diplomats has sent a letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz urging an end to the U.S. nuclear fuel program at the government’s Savannah River complex that they say is too costly and a threat to non-proliferation efforts.

...The signatories included former nuclear arms negotiators Robert Einhorn and Robert Gallucci; former ambassadors Thomas Pickering and Joseph Nye; former White House director for arms control, former Pentagon and intelligence official Henry S. Rowen; former head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Matthews; former Nuclear Regulation Commission members Peter Bradford and Victor Gilinsky; National Medal of Science winner and a designer of the first hydrogen bomb Richard Garwin; and nuclear policy experts Henry Sokolski, Frank von Hippel, S. David Freeman and Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione.

SRS Watch has posted the letter online.

The MOX fuel fabrication facility [FFF] at the U.S. Department of Energy's [DOE] Savannah River Site [SRS] was supposed to convent 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel for commercial atomic reactors. MOX is short for Mixed Oxide, referring to mixed uranium-plutonium oxide nuclear fuel.

The MOX FFF has proceeded despite the protests of anti-nuclear and non-proliferation critics for the past two decades, who urged that the excess weapons-grade plutonium be mixed back into the high-level radioactive waste from which it came in the first place, and treated as dangerous, deadly radioactive waste, not a commercial nuclear power commodity.

The MOX FFF project has turned into a $5 billion boondoggle. The still under construction MOX FFF was built too small to house the needed equipment, for one thing! But if the project continues, tens of billions of additional taxpayer dollars could be wasted, on an undertaking that undermines U.S. credibility on nuclear weapons non-proliferation, not to mention the risks of using plutonium fuel in reactors not designed for it in the first place.

For example, Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 had loaded MOX fuel into its reactor core in September 2010, just six months before the nuclear catastrophe began. 6% of the core consisted of MOX fuel; plans were to expand that to a 33% MOX core. Unit 3 then experienced the largest of the hydrogen gas explosions in March 2011, after its core began to melt down. The radioactive dust, so to speak, has not yet settled on what role the MOX fuel played in contributing to the full-scale melt down at Unit 3, the size of its destructive H2 explosion, and, most significantly of all, the severity of the hazardous radioactivity releases that resulted.

Critics have long resisted MOX. This has included grassroots anti-nuclear efforts, as in the Midwest. In the mid- to late-1990s, for example, a coalition of groups from Chicago to Ontario undertook a Nix MOX caravan, that generated significant media coverage.

This was followed by a lawsuit -- Alice Hirt v. Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy -- in federal court in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The pro bono environmental attorneys, Terry Lodge and Kary Love, on behalf of clients including Alice Hirt of Don't Waste Michigan in Holland, MI, sought to block DOE's shipment of weapons-grade plutonium, converted to experimental MOX reactor fuel, by truck from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory in New Mexico, through Michigan, to Chalk River Nuclear Lab, Ontario. The environmental coalition initially won a Temporary Restraining Order against the shipment in late 1999, but by January 2000, DOE was able to force the shipment through.

Despite this, plans to use MOX fuel at Commonwealth Edison (later Exelon) reactors in IL, as well as at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in ON, fell apart. The MOX FFF at SRS, however, has kept the MOX scheme alive for 20 years, at huge cost to U.S. federal taxpayers, as well as at risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and environmental catastrophe.

Here are some additional examples of Nix MOX activism in the late 1990s:

• NIRS press release: Citizens Rally to Protect the Great Lakes-Urge Michigan’s Attorney General to Stop Plutonium Shipments, NIRS press release. November 10, 1999.
• NIRS questions on the “Parallex” Environmental Assessment for the proposed weapons-grade plutonium MOX shipment through Michigan for the meeting in Lansing with the U.S. Dept. of Energy, October 31, 1999.
• NIRS Comments on the DOE Office of Fissile Materials Disposition Environmental Assessment for the Parallex Project Fuel(MOX) Manufacture and Shipment (DOE/EA-1216, dated January 1999), Friday, October 29, 1999.
• DOE’s “Parallex” shipment of weapons-usable plutonium MOX nuclear fuel from Los Alamos, New Mexico to Chalk River, Ontario, Canada. NIRS Alert. October 29, 1999.

"Obama secures votes to protect Iran nuclear deal"

As reported by the Washington Post, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) has announced her support for the Iran Nuclear Deal. As the 34th U.S. Senator to do so, this secures enough support to protect President Obama's promised veto, if and when expected congressional measures of disapproval are passed, by majority vote, in the U.S. Senate and House before Sept. 17, the deadline for such an action. President Obama needs only one house of Congress to sustain his veto, in order to stave off congressional disapproval and secure the Iran Nuclear Deal negotiated by his Secretary of State, John Kerry.

There is some possibility still remaining that President Obama won't need to use his veto pen. If 41 U.S. Senators support the Iran Nuclear Deal, they can successfully filibuster a vote on disapproval -- meaning the pact can be secured that way, as well.

PSR: "Experts Agree: Approve the Iran Deal - Take Action!"

In an action alert urging support for the Iran Nuclear Deal, Physicians for Social Responsibility point out that:

- 29 leading scientists - including Nobel Prize winners - support the Iran deal in a letter to President Obama;
- 75 nuclear non-proliferation experts support Iran deal in an open statement;
- 340 Rabbis urge Congress to support the Iran deal in an open letter;
- 100 former American Ambassadors support the Iran deal in a letter to President Obama; and
- 36 retired generals and admirals support the Iran deal in an open letter.

PSR's action alert allows you and quick and easy way to communicate your support for the Iran Nuclear Deal to your two U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative, and urges them to vote in favor of it.

President Obama has vowed to veto a congressional override of the Iran Nuclear Deal. However, he must hold onto at least one-third of the U.S. House or U.S. Senate in order to sustain his veto.