Urge PHMSA to undertake Programmatic EIS on water-borne radioactive waste shipments!

Cynthia L. Quarterman, Administrator, U.S. DOT Pipelines and Haz. Mat. Safety Admin. (PHMSA)The U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) is the federal agency that must approve Bruce Power's controversial and risky proposed shipment of 16 radioactive steam generators, originating in Ontario and bound for Sweden, before it enters U.S. territorial waters on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. PHMSA is infamous for its negligence in major oil pipeline leaks into rivers, deadly natural gas pipeline explosions, and the cozy relationships between the agency's top leadership and the very companies and industries PHMSA is supposed to regulate. Thanks to 7 Great Lakes U.S. Senators, it was revealed that PHMSA has previously rubberstamped approvals for 17 water-borne shipments of large, radioactive nuclear components in the past. These shipments travelled on rivers, bays, and sea coasts across the U.S., and even on the waters of Lake Michigan. PHMSA very quietly granted "approvals or special permits" for shipping radioactive steam generators, reactor pressure vessels, pressurizers, and reactor vessel heads with little or no notice to, or attention from, the public, media, emergency responders, or elected officials. Given the radiological risks of these shipments, and the precedent they set for shipping high-level radioactive wastes by water, PHMSA must undertake a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This should include an adequate period for submission of public comments, including public hearings across the U.S. in places that have been targeted in the past for such shipments, or could be in the future. Contact PHMSA Administrator Cynthia L. Quarterman, urging her to undertake a PEIS -- including a public comment period and public hearings -- in order to fully comply with NEPA, as she assured the U.S. Senators that she would. You can email her at phmsa.administrator@dot.gov; fax her at (202) 366-3666; phone her at (202) 366-4433; or send her a letter at Cynthia L. Quarterman, Administrator, U.S. Department of Transportation, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, East Building, 2nd Floor, Mail Stop: E27-300, 1200 New Jersey Ave., SE, Washington, DC 20590. Also, contact your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative via the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and request that they urge PHMSA Administrator Quarterman to do a PEIS as well. Additional information on the Bruce Power radioactive steam generator shipment from Canada to Sweden can be found on Beyond Nuclear's Canada website section.

So-called "low" level radioactive waste shipments by water could set bad precedent for much worse to come!

Should the fresh surface waters of the U.S. -- primary drinking water supplies for countless tens and even hundreds of millions of Americans -- be used as shipping lanes for radioactive waste? Should the fishing grounds in our oceanic bays and coasts become haz. mat. routes for irradiated nuclear fuel? The nuclear establishment in industry and government seems to think so.

Bruce Power's proposal to ship 16 radioactive steam generators, so-called "low" level radioactive wastes -- despite containing mostly ultra-hazardous plutonium isotopes, as well as other hazardous radioactive substances -- could set a bad precedent that will pave the way for vastly more radiologically risky shipments of high-level radioactive waste in the future. In its 2002 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada dump, the U.S. Department of Energy revealed it was considering barging irradiated nuclear fuel on waterways across the U.S. The DOE's targets included the Chesapeake Bay, the James River in Virginia, the Delaware Bay, the waterways (Long Island Sound, the Hudson River, etc.) surrounding metro New York City, the waterways of Massachusetts (Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts Bay, and Boston Harbor), Lake Michigan, the Mississippi River, the Tennessee River, the Missouri River, the Pacific coastline of California, and the Atlantic coastline of Florida. Wisely, President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu zeroed out the Yucca Mountain Project's funding in 2009, effectively cancelling the dump.

However, any away-from-reactor plans for irradiated nuclear fuel -- such as reprocessing or centralized interim storage, under consideration by Obama and Chu's "Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future" -- could revive such high-level radioactive waste water-borne shipping plans. For example, a report put out by Common Sense at the Nuclear Crossroads, using a DOE routing computer program, shows that water-borne shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel bound for a proposed commercial reprocessing facility at Savannah River Site, South Carolina, could target the Great Lakes, rivers, bays and sea coasts.

In terms of safety and security risks, these water-borne shipments of high-level radioactive waste can be regarded as potential floating Chernobyls or dirty bombs targeted at our drinking water supplies, fishing grounds, beaches, and largest ports.

Radioactive waste "cargo" on the Great Lakes would violate Haudenosaunee 7th Generation Philosophy

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River contain 20% of the world's surface fresh water.An op-ed in the Toronto Star by associate professor of environment at the University of Toronto, Stephen Bede Scharper, points out that in addition to being the drinking water supply and source of fisheries, the Great Lakes are also the source of emotional and spiritual sustenance for more than 35 million people in the U.S., Canada, and numerous Native American First Nations. Thus it's easy to see how Bruce Power's shipment of 16 plutonium-contaminated steam generators on the Great Lakes, approved by the Canadian Nuclear Safety (sic) Commission on Feb. 4th, would violate not only the Haudenosaunee Seventh Generation Spiritual Philosophy, but also the Preautionary Principle. Speaking of the Haudenosaunee, the Mohawk Nations have spoken out strongly against this shipment, as have a number of other First Nations coalitions in Ontario and Quebec. The fight now may now be moving into the Canadian courts, as well as to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. PHMSA's approval is required before the shipment can enter U.S. waters on the Great Lakes. A growing environmental coalition is calling on PHMSA to undertake a full Environmental Impact Statement, complete with public heaings and a public comment period.

KIMO lambasts proposal for BP's radioactive waste shipment to traverse European marine waters

Radioactive steam generator bound by boat from Canada, via the Great Lakes and Atlantic, to Sweden.KIMO (Kommunenes Internasjonale Miljøorganisasjon, which translates as Local Authorities International Environmental Organisation) -- a European environmental coalition of municipal authorities dedicated to protecting their marine environment homelands -- has spoken out strongly against Bruce Power's (BP) proposal to ship 16 plutonium-contaminated steam generators to Sweden for so-called "recycling." The Studsvik radioactive metal "recycling" facility -- besides contaminating the recycled metal supply with hazardous radioactivity -- also spews radioactive discharges into the Baltic Sea, which does not sit well with KIMO. As also reported on its homepage, KIMO has also spoken out against the hazards of so-called "floating" nuclear power plants, as proposed by the Russian nuclear establishment (the French nuclear establishment, for its part, has proposed underwater atomic reactors for deployment on the ocean floor -- perhaps to complement the radioactive waste its La Hague reprocessing facility already spews into the English Channel?!).

Three states sue NRC over Nuclear Waste Con Game

The States of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut today filed lawsuits against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's December 2010 update to its Nuclear Waste Confidence Rule. NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence Game (a con game is any elaborate swindling operation in which advantage is taken of the confidence the victim reposes in the swindler) started in 1984 (appropriately enough, in the Orwellian sense), when NRC ruled that the generation of irradiated nuclear fuel was reasonable, given that it had "confidence" that a repository would open by 2007 to 2009. In 1990, NRC revised its "confidence" date to 2025, where it remained till the December update, when a date-certain was removed entirely. NRC's current con game holds that waste can remain safely stored on-site for at least 120 years (60 years of operations, and 60 years post-shutdown). However, the NRC Commissioners have ordered NRC staff to investigate "confidence" levels of "safe" storage on-site for much longer time periods, into the centuries. Of course, all this "confidence" willfully ignores the safety, security, and environmental risks of on-site pool storage and dry cask storage, none of which was designed to withstand severe terrorist attacks, for example. Three close calls to heavy load drops -- at Prairie Island, Palisades, and Vermont Yankee -- have risked sudden drain downs of pool cooling water, which would lead quickly to radioactive waste infernos unleashing up to 100% of the cesium-137 content of pools (tens of millions of curies, as compared to the 2.4 million curies of cesium-137 released at Chernobyl), according to NRC staff itself. A 2001 NRC pool fire study estimated that 25,000 people could die downwind of a pool fire from latent cancer, with deaths occurring as far downwind as 500 miles away. An earlier 1997 NRC study put the casualty figures much higher. The Attorneys General of NY, CT, and VT deserve tremendous thanks for this long overdue challenge to NRC's nuclear waste con game. A coalition of nearly 200 environmental groups has called since 2006 for "hardened on-site storage" as an interim safety and security measure to protest irradiated nuclear fuel from accidents and attacks. Calls have been ongoing for quality assurance upgrades on dry cask storage as well, to prevent radioactivity leaks over time from the concrete and/or steel silos that are located out in the open, exposed to the degrading impacts of the elements.