OPG radioactive waste dump a "declaration of war against the Great Lakes"

As reported in last week's Beyond Nuclear email bulletin, resistance is mounting on both sides of the Great Lakes international border to Ontario Power Generation's (OPG) plan to bury radioactive wastes on the Lake Huron shoreline.

On Aug. 19, Beyond Nuclear's Radioactive Waste Watchdog, Kevin Kamps, was honored to be invited to speak at the ‘Save the Great Lakes from Nuclear Waste’ town hall meeting at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. Michigan State Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood, D-Taylor, and State Rep. Sarah Roberts, D-St. Clair Shores, organized the event. In May, Hopgood introduced a resolution, which passed the Michigan State Senate unanimously, urging the U.S. House and Senate to oppose the plan. Roberts is poised to introduce a similar resolution once the Michigan State House legislative session resumes.

Hopgood and Roberts, along with a panel of experts, which included Ed McArdle of the Sierra Club's South East Michigan Group, as well as Beverly Fernandez of the Ontario-based group Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, provided information about OPG's proposed deep geological repository at the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant on the Lake Huron shoreline, and the impact it could have on Michigan’s water, economy, fishing, tourism, health and future.

Those opposed to the DUD plan are urged to sign Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump's online petition.

As reported by the Detroit Free Press:

'Opponents of a proposal to build an underground nuclear waste dump less than a mile from the shores of Lake Huron railed tonight in Detroit against a project they called a declaration of war against the Great Lakes...

Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist for Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear, said the project would be unprecedented because nuclear waste has not been stored underground in the Great Lakes region and could be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

“This proposal is insane. It’s a declaration of war against the Great Lakes,” Kamps said...'.

The Macomb Daily Tribune also reported on this story.

On August 12th, the Macomb Daily Tribune ran another comprehensive article about the proposed Canadian radioactive waste dump, and opposition to it downstream in eastern Michigan.

Ontario's Lucknow Sentinel also reported on the town hall meeting.

MI State Senator Hopgood releases video and petition against proposed Canadian nuclear dump, will hold town hall meeting

MI State Senator HopgoodFor Immediate Release, August 13, 2013

Contact: Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood, (517) 373-7800

Hopgood Releases Video on Proposed Canadian Nuclear Dump

Potentially Disastrous Canadian Underground Radioactive Nuclear Waste Repository Proposed off the Shore of Lake Huron 

LANSING – Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood (D–Taylor) released a video today informing the public about the proposed construction of a Canadian underground radioactive nuclear waste repository about ½ mile off the shore of Lake Huron. In the video, Hopgood urges residents to sign the petition and write their federal legislators on the issue in order to protect the Great Lakes from potential radioactive contamination. The video is available for viewing at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7RUIT41Wh8.

“Many Michigan residents are just learning about this highly controversial project, but citizen opposition on both sides of the border continues to intensify,” said Senator Hopgood. “I first became aware of the planned nuclear waste dump this spring and the more I learn, the more gravely concerned I become about the prospect of burying untold amounts of radioactive nuclear waste in untested and unprecedented materials, so near to the main source of drinking water intakes for southeast Michigan.”

Ontario Power Generation is proposing to construct an underground long-term burial facility for all of Ontario’s radioactive waste at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, some of which will remain toxic for over 100,000 years. This site, less than a mile inland from the shore of Lake Huron and about 440 yards below the lake level, is approximately 120 miles upstream from the main drinking water intakes for southeast Michigan. Early news reports revealed that money provided to the host city and surrounding areas may be clouding the issue.

Senator Hopgood and Representative Sarah Roberts are also inviting the public to join them, and a panel of experts, for a town hall to discuss the proposed repository. The town hall will take place on Monday, August 19th from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Keith Center Lecture Hall on the 2nd floor of Wayne State University Law School, 471 West Palmer Street, Detroit, MI 48202. The petition is available at www.cleanmiwater.com.

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Update on August 15, 2013 by admin

MI State Sen. Hopgood and Rep. Roberts have released a flier about the August 19th town hall meeting. Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps has been invited to join Ed McArdle of Sierra Club's Michigan Chapter, and Beverly Fernandez of Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump, on the panel.

On August 13th, Kevin filed a written submission to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, protesting the fatally flawed environmental assessment of cumulative impacts on the Great Lakes associated with the proposed radioactive waste DUD at Bruce. CNSC and CEAA are proceeding full steam ahead with licensing the insane proposal, and are about to hold oral hearings from September through November. Kevin will testify for 30 minutes before the Joint Review Panel.

Many other groups, including Northwatch and Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes, also filed written submissions by the arbitrarily short Aug. 13th deadline.

Court "orders the doing of a useless act": federal appeals panel orders NRC to resume Yucca dump licensing despite next to no funds

Jim Day, Las Vegas Review Journal, 2010 (be sure to court the toes!)

The Yucca Mountain radioactive waste dump zombie's sixth toe twitched today.

By a 2-1 split decision, a three judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit approved a writ of mandamus sought by the States of Washington and South Carolina, et al., ordering the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to resume the licensing proceeding for the proposed Yucca Mountain national dumpsite for high-level radioactive waste (HLRW). NRC had suspended the proceeding for lack of congressionally appropriated funding in 2011.

Two of the appeals judges felt the $11.1 million remaining in NRC's Yucca licensing coffers is a substantial amount of funding with which to resume the proceedings.

But Chief Judge Garland disagreed, pointing out that in its last fully funded year of the proceedings, NRC budgeted nearly $100 million. Since, NRC has largely dismantled its digital and physical infrastructures for even conducting the proceedings, as has the former license applicant, the U.S. Department of Energy, which has moved to withdraw the license application, and has let go its Yucca program staff.

He also pointed out that Yucca's ultimate price tag would require Congress to approve not just over $100 million per year in licensing support, but, if the application is ultimately approved, many tens of billions of dollars to carry out construction and operation (DOE's last estimate for the total cost of Yucca, should it proceed, made several years ago, was nearly $100 billion).

Chief Judge Garland then dissented to the ruling, arguing that what little money NRC has remaining should be used to preserve the existing records from this largest ever licensing proceeding in the agency's history, writing:

"In short, given the limited funds that remain available, issuing a writ of mandamus amounts to little more than ordering the Commission to spend part of those funds unpacking its boxes, and the remainder packing them up again."

Extensive media coverage of the court decision, and reactions to it, are posted at the State of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects "What's News" website.

NRC attempting to race through Nuke Waste Con Game revision; public comments will be needed this fall

Just days after attorney Diane Curran and expert witness Dr. Gordon Thompson of Institute for Resource and Security Studies submitted highly critical comments to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), on behalf of an environmental coalition including Beyond Nuclear, calling for the agency to withdraw its fatally-flawed draft study of the risks of catastrophic fires in high-level radioactive waste storage (HLRW) pools, NRC is moving full steam ahead with its Nuclear Waste Confidence environmental impact statement process.

On August 5th, NRC Waste Confidence Directorate released the following:

"Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved—subject to certain changes that the NRC staff must make—publication of the proposed Waste Confidence Rule and Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement.  The Commission’s instructions to staff, in the form of a Staff Requirements Memorandum, are available at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/srm/2013/2013-0061srm.pdf (ADAMS No. ML13217A358). 

The NRC staff will now make the changes directed by the Commission and will publish the proposed Waste Confidence Rule and Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement in September for public comment.  The NRC staff will notify members of this e-mail list when publication occurs.

The Commission-review versions of the proposed Waste Confidence Rule and Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement are available at http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/wcd.html.  When the staff publishes the proposed rule and draft generic EIS—with changes as directed by the Commission—the staff will post both documents to the Waste Confidence webpage.  The staff will also post versions of the documents that identify the changes the NRC staff made in response to the Commission’s Staff Requirements Memorandum. 

Public Outreach Update

On Tuesday, July 23, 2013, the Waste Confidence Directorate held an “NRC Chat.”  Please visit http://chat.nrc-gateway.gov/2013/07/15/waste-confidence/ to view the discussion. 

On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, from 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. EDT, the Waste Confidence Directorate will hold a status teleconference.  To participate, please dial 1-800-857-2553, and provide the operator with passcode 3682386.  Please dial in 5 minutes before the start time so that all participants can be connected before the teleconference begins.  The meeting notice is available at http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1320/ML13205A393.pdf (ADAMS No. ML13205A393) for more information.  

Thank you for your interest in the Waste Confidence environmental review and rulemaking, and we look forward to your participation in the status teleconference on August 14^th."

This means that NRC will publish a Federal Register Notice in coming weeks. The Fed Reg Notice will announce 10 public meetings at which NRC will receive public comment, likely to take place in late September or early October. Exact dates/times have not yet been announced. NRC is allowing a mere 75 days for public comment. After digesting NRC's voluminous Waste Confidence EIS documents, Beyond Nuclear will prepare sample public comments in the next several weeks, in order to provide our supporters with talking points they can use to submit public comments to NRC.

The first and last public comment meetings will be held at NRC's HQ in Rockville, Maryland. These can be attended in person, but will also be available for viewing online, as well as through a telephone call-in number.

In addition, NRC has announced that the remaining 8 meetings will take place in: Boston, MA; New York City, NY; Denver, CO; Minneapolis, MN; San Clemente, CA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Toledo, OH and Charlotte, NC. Exact locations have not yet been announced. The regional meetings must be attended in-person; no online or telephone access will be provided.

Michael Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes has put out the call for a big turn out of concerned citizens and environmental group representatives for the Toledo hearing. Big turn outs will be essential at all ten of the meetings.

In June 2012, a coalition of 4 environmental groups (Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and Riverkeeper) and 4 states (CT, NJ, NY, VT) won a huge court victory, when the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down NRC's 2010 update to its Nuclear Waste Confidence for inadequately examining the risks of long-term on-site storgage of irradiated nuclear fuel in indoor pools and outdoor dry casks. The court ordered NRC to undertake an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which, under the National Environmental Impact Statement, should have been completed decades ago. The court even mandated that NRC examine the possibility that a deep geologic repository will never open, and the HLRW will be stuck forever at the reactor sites where it was generated in the first place.

Diane Curran of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg + Eisenberg, LLP of Washington, D.C., along with Mindy Goldstein of Emory University's Turner Environmental Law Clinic, represented BREDL, SACE, and Riverkeeper. Dr. Arjun Makhijani of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Dr. Thompson of IRSS, and Phillip Musegaas of Riverkeeper, served as expert witnesses. Senior attorney Geoff Fettus represented NRDC.

The environmental coalition was joined by the Attorneys General of CT, NJ, NY, and VT in upending NRC's false Nuclear Waste Confidence.

The environmental coalition has since grown to dozens of groups, including Beyond Nuclear. The groups, engaged in three dozen NRC licensing proceedings regarding new reactor COLAs (combined Construction and Operating License Applications), as well as old reactor 20-year license extension applications, has wrested from the NRC Commission a 2-year postponement of any license approval finalizations. However, the licensing proceedings continue apace, right up to the very brink, but just shy, of final approval. Beyond Nuclear alone has secured 2-year postponements on finalization of the Fermi 3, MI proposed new reactor COLA, as well as 20-year license extensions at Grand Gulf, MS and Davis-Besse, OH, by applying the Nuclear Waste Confidence court victory in those proceedings.

NRC staff had previously stated that a Waste Confidence EIS would take 7 years to complete. But now it is racing through the entire process in just 2 years, apparently in an effort to "inconvenience" the nuclear power industry's license applications as little as possible.

Dr. Gordon Thompson's "devastating critique" of NRC's HLRW storage pool fire risk whitewash

Dr. Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, MAYesterday, to meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) arbitrarily short 30-day deadline for public comments on its "Draft Consequence Study of a Beyond-Design-Basis Earthquake Affecting the Spent Fuel Pool for a US Mark I Boiling Water Reactor" (NRC-2013-013), attorney Diane Curran and expert witness Dr. Gordon Thompson filed a blistering response on behalf of an environmental coalition of 26 groups, including Beyond Nuclear.

In her cover letter to NRC, Curran wrote: "...the Draft Consequence Study is not a credible scientific document. While the study purports to be a broad scientific inquiry into pool fire phenomena, in fact it is a very narrow study that ignores basic pool fire phenomena and important pool fire accident contributors. It misleadingly implies that a severe earthquake causing complete draining of a fuel pool is the primary source of risk to a spent fuel pool, and assumes that open-rack low-density pool storage is not advantageous without even examining it. In short, the Consequence Study appears designed to advance the authors’ pre-determined and unsupported conclusion that high-density pool storage is safe."

Thompson makes clear that a partial drain down of a high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pool is an even worse-case scenario than a complete drain down, for air cooling provided by convection currents -- which might otherwise prevent ignition of the irradiated nuclear fuel's combustible zirconium cladding -- is blocked by the layer of water in the bottom of the pool. Thompson points out that any technically-competent analyst who has been paying attention to pool-fire risks since 1979 would have known that, and charges NRC with being deliberately misleading. He also points out the potentially catastrophic consequences of pool fires -- over 4 million people could be displaced, long-term, from their homes, as even NRC acknowledges.

Curran concluded: "We are appalled that after decades of avoiding and obfuscating this urgent safety issue, the NRC now proposes to rely on this biased and unscientific document to justify continued high-density
pool storage of spent fuel, both in its post-Fukushima safety review and in the Draft Waste Confidence Environmental Impact Statement. We join Dr. Thompson in urging you to withdraw the Draft Consequence Study and begin anew with a study of spent fuel pool fire risks that finally complies with basic principles of sound scientific inquiry."

Curran represented a coalition of environmental groups which, along with a coalition of state attorneys general, prevailed against NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence at the second highest court in the land. The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that NRC must complete an environmental impact statement on the risks of on-site storage of HLRW at reactors, including in pools. NRC did not appeal the ruling, and quickly acknowledged that the completion of the EIS would prevent finalization of proposed new reactor license approvals, as well as old reactor license extension approvals, for at least two years (NRC had previously admitted that a Nuclear Waste Confidence EIS would take seven years to complete!).

Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, has heralded Dr. Thompson's work as a "devastating critique." Alvarez adds, "Gordon's comments systematically reveal the kinds of scientific malpractice the NRC is resorting to at a time when one of the nation's largest and oldest high-hazard enterprises faces a deepening economic crisis."

Alvarez, formerly a senior advisor to the Energy Secretary during the Clintion administration, knows what he's talking about. Along with Dr. Thompson, now-NRC Chairwoman, Ph.D. geologist Allison Macfarlane, and five more experts, Alvarez published "Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power-Reactor Fuel in the United States," in Jan., 2003. This groundbreaking warning about the potentially catastrophic risks of HLRW pool fires was largely affirmed by a congressionally-ordered National Academy of Science study in 2005; NRC unsuccessfully attempted to block the security-redacted public release of NAS's findings. Alvarez also published a May 2011 report on the hazards of high-density pool storage across the U.S., in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. And in June, in a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth, Alvarez focused on the risks of HLRW pool storage at the now permanently shutdown San Onofre nuclear power plant.