Back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill make clear: the Yucca dump and Mobile Chernobyl "ain't dead yet!"

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump is dead. By Jim Day, Las Vegas Review-Journal - 2/1/2010 (be sure to count the toes!)

Take Action!

Urge your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative to block S. 1240, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, and instead to require Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) for high-level radioactive wastes at atomic reactors.

Also, contact U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and urge that he oppose S. 1240, since "consent-based" principles for siting "consolidated interim storage" sites and permanent geologic disposal repositories have been gutted.

You can be patched through to Members of Congress via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

Take advantage of your U.S. Senators and Representative being back home for the annual August congressional recess. Get together with your friends, neighbors, and organizations in your area. Contact your Congress Members' schedulers in Washington, D.C. to request a face-to-face meeting with them, to discuss your concerns with S. 1240! If that is not possible, follow up with a request for a face-to-face meeting with their district staff.

Background and Updates

To borrow a phrase from Monty Python's "Holy Grail," the radioactive mutant zombie (see political cartoon, left, and be sure to count the toes!) that is the proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada high-level radioactive waste dump "ain't dead yet!" But hopefully, it ain't "feeling better," either!

On July 30th, the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Ron Wyden (D-OR), held a hearing on S. 1240, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013. Witnesses included Dave Lochbaum of UCS, and Geoff Fettus of NRDC. The video archive of the entire hearing is posted at the ENR website, as are the written submissions of all the witnesses, and the opening statements of the ENR Chairman, Ranking Member, etc.

Lochbaum urged that the legislation address the decades-neglected safety risks of densely-packed high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pools. He pointed out that "thinning out" HLRW storage pools could prevent a catastrophic radioactive waste fire, outside containment, resulting in: a collective population dose of 350,000 person-rems of exposure to hazardous radioactivity; 9,400 square miles of radioactively contaminated, interdicted land; and 4.1 million long-term displaced individuals (however, even a "low-density" HLRW storage pool fire could still result in: 27,000 person-rems of exposure; 170 square miles of interdicted land; and 81,000 long-term displaced individuals).

Fettus expressed strong opposition to the severing of linkage between "centralized" or "consolidated interim storage" and permanent disposal, raising the specter of default, de facto permanent surface storage for HLRW.

Both UCS and NRDC, along with 200 national, regional, and local grassroots environmental and public interest groups across the country, have long endorsed Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). Despite this obvious, common sense first step for upgrading safety, security, health, and environmental protections, the call for HOSS has fallen on deaf ears for over a decade, at both the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

A hopeful moment in the Senate ENR hearing came when witness Marvin Fertel, head of the industry lobbying arm Nuclear Energy Institute, insisted that HLRW storage pools, even at Fukushima Daiichi, are safe, sound, and secure. ENR Chairman Wyden -- who traveled to Fukushima Daiichi in spring, 2012, donned a radiation protection suit, and inspected the blasted site -- strongly disagreed with him. In fact, Wyden has called for the full resources of the U.S. government and military to assist at Fukushima Daiichi to remove the HLRW from the Unit #4 storage pool before the building collapses, and the HLRW ignites into a catastrophic radioactive inferno.

Republican committee members, such as Jim Risch of Idaho and John Barrasso of Wyoming, pressed Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on why the proposed Yucca Mountain dumpsite in Nevada has been abandoned by the Obama administration.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit has ruled in favor of the States of South Carolina and Washington, ordering NRC to resume its indefinitely-suspended Yucca dump licensing proceeding. However, the Obama administration has not requested funding from Congress in three years to support the Yucca Mountain Project, so there are next to no resources left to conduct the proceeding, neither at NRC nor DOE.

The Republican clamor for the Yucca dump was even more shrill at the July 31st U.S. House Environment and the Economy Subcommittee hearing chaired by John Shimkus (R-IL). The "Congressman from Exelon" has multiple atomic reactors in, and adjacent to, the area of his congressional district. As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Shimkus floated the offer to Nevada of the $5.6 billion estimated to be needed to be spent in order to carry out the aims of S. 1240 in the next decade alone, in order to "lure" the Silver State into reconsidering its tireless, adamant opposition to the Yucca dump.

As reported in the LVRJ article: 'In response to Shimkus, Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said after the hearing that Nevada “is not for sale.”

“Would $5.6 billion be a ‘good lure’ for Collinsville, Illinois?” Titus said, referring to Shimkus’ hometown. “We could ship the waste there, maybe by barge on the Mississippi?”'

As reported by the National Journal: 'Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., broke from his Democratic colleagues, questioning the cost of finding alternatives. He asked Moniz if Yucca Mountain was no longer an option given his support for the new approach. "The issue's not dead," Moniz responded. Dingell pressed further, asking if the Yucca site was still "viable." Moniz responded: "It needs both science and public acceptance, the latter is not there." Dingell and Upton [R-MI] penned a joint op-ed earlier this month calling for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reach a final decision on Yucca Mountain.' (emphasis added)

Ironically enough, NRC's Chairwoman, Allison Macfarlane, a Ph.D. geologist, literally wrote the book on the Yucca dump's scientific unsuitability! Macfarlane was also a member of the BRC.

Why President Obama, former Energy Secretary Chu, and current Energy Secretary Moniz, will not address the scientific unsuitability of the Yucca dump proposal is not clear.

Dingell, the longest-serving Member of Congress in U.S. history, is the "Congressman from Detroit Edison": his district in southeast MI "hosts" the biggest General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor in the entire world, on the Lake Erie shoreline. Fermi Unit 2 is nearly as big as Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 and 2 put together. Dingell, who entered the U.S. House in 1955, was serving when the Fermi Unit 1 experimental plutonium breeder reactor suffered a partial meltdown on October 5, 1966. Despite this near-miss with disaster, documented in John G. Fuller's 1975 classic We Almost Lost Detroit, Dingell has remained loyal to the nuclear industry's agenda, including his advocacy for the Yucca dump.

Fred Upton, Republican Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the "Congressman from Entergy and American Electric Power," with three atomic reactors in his southwest MI congressional district, at the Palisades and Cook nuclear power plants on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The importance of "public acceptance" was an apt observation by Moniz, who also "served" on President Obama's and Energy Secretary Chu's so-called "Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future" (BRC) from 2010-2012. Although the BRC's final report, and the "Gang of 4's" (Wyden, plus ENR Ranking Republican Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, as well as Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Ranking Republican Lamar Alexander (R-TN)) S. 1240, trumpet a "consent-based" approach to opening "consolidated interim storage" sites (beginning in 2021) and permanent disposal geologic repositories (by 2048), public comments, concerns, and criticisms have been largely to entirely ignored.

Despite countless calls for HOSS at numerous BRC public hearings, Moniz et al. refused to call for it, ironically expressing confidence in the safety of HLRW storage pools, even in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. In fact, the BRC and its staff reportedly did not even read the many thousands of written submissions the panel encouraged concerned citizens and environmental organizations to submit!

Tragically, the U.S. Senate ENR Committee has followed BRC's bad faith example. The ENR Committee called on citizens and organizations to submit comments on its "Discussion Draft" of S. 1240. Beyond Nuclear, along with 2,500 individuals and more than 100 groups, answered ENR's call, in good faith. The ENR Committee not only refused to take the comments seriously, but the final draft of S. 1240 was even worse than the "Discussion Draft."

For example, the linkage between interim storage and permanent disposal has been made even weaker, if it has not been broken altogether. Also, the bill, if enacted, would allow for "consolidated interim storage" sites to be studied and even found suitable, without the consent of the targeted locality, Native American reservation, and/or state! Although "consent" would supposedly still be required before the parking lot dump could actually be constructed and operated, the momentum in that direction would be huge. Any resistance could be all the more easily smothered by the "prize": "incentives," "economic development," "jobs," or other inducements -- in other words, payoffs, buy outs, or legalized bribery. Such "sweeteners" for "hosting" vast amounts of some of the most deadly substances ever created by humankind, forever deadly HLRWs, are likely to be targeted at politically or economically vulnerable communities, such as Native American reservations, already heavily radiologically-burdened DOE sites (WIPP, NM; SRS, SC; INL, ID), or commercial nuclear power plants (such as Dresden, IL).

It appears that, in the "Gentlemen's Club" of the U.S. Senate, the suggestions of nuclear industry lobbyists carry a bit more weight than those of environmentalists and public interest groups. But why wouldn't they, given it's the "best Congress money can buy"? (Judy Pasternak at the American University Investigative Reporting Workshop documented that between 1999 and 2009, the nuclear power industry spent $645 million on federal lobbying, and another $65 million on federal campaign contributions. That adds up to way more than a million dollars per week, for a decade! If anything, the rate of such legalized bribery has likely increased in the past four years.)

As with the BRC, the "Gang of 4's" S. 1240 has put parking lot dumps -- and the Mobile Chernobyls they would launch -- on the fast track. A "pilot" consolidated interim storage site is foreseen by 2021, to house "stranded" or "orphaned" HLRWs at permanently shutdown, and sometimes entirely dismantled, atomic reactors. The supposed justification is so that those sites can be "released" for "un-restricted re-use," ignoring the fact that these sites are still significantly radioactively contaminated, even after the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in decommissioning "clean-up" costs. The Big Rock Point nuclear power plant in northern MI is just such a case in point. This supposed justification for rushing removal of "stranded" HLRWs also rings completely hollow, as the "host" communities, who know better than anyone how dangerous the wastes are, have clearly stated "not in our name."

Communities nationwide had better express their "non-consent," and their lack of "public acceptance," had better "speak now, or forever hold their peace," or else their communities, states, or regions could soon find themselves targeted for "hosting" parking lot dumps and/or permanent burial sites, or "serving" as crossroads for HLRW through-shipments by road, rail, or waterway. S. 1240 must be blocked, and replaced by HOSS!

Mayor, environmentalists declare victory of people power over nuclear power

Sarnia Mayor Mike BradleyAs reported by the Sarnia Observer, the Mayor of Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, Mike Bradley (photo, left), has declared victory in a years-long campaign to block the shipment of radioactive steam generators, by boat on the Great Lakes, from Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Kincardine, Ontario, across the Pacific, to Sweden. 

“It's a real testament to citizen power,” said Bradley, who has been a vocal critic of the move, along with a growing list of Ontario mayors, coalition groups, environmental activists, and U.S. Senators. “We're fighting a very large and powerful organization.”

First Nations, including the Mohawks, as well as hundreds of municipalities in Quebec representing millions of citizens along the targeted shipment route, made the difference for the resistance.

Kay Cumbow, the nuclear power watchdog in Michigan who first discovered the risky shipping scheme through her research, then warned and activated others, has said "Thanks to everyone who wrote letters, signed petitions and helped get the word out about the dangers of this scheme that would have put the Great Lakes at risk, endangered workers as well as communities enroute, and would have put radioactive materials into the global recycled metal supply."

Maude Barlow, national chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, was quoted by the Ottawa Citizen: "This is a huge victory for communities around the Great Lakes...The Great Lakes belong to everyone and communities have a right to say 'no' to any projects that will harm them."

As indicated by Mayor Bradley in a separate Sarnia Observer article, the next big fight against "nuclear madness" brewing at Bruce involves proposals by Ontario Power Generation, the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to bury all of Ontario's so-called "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes -- from 20 atomic reactors across the province -- within a mile of the Lake Huron shoreline. Several communities near Bruce, largely populated by Bruce nuclear workers and in effect company towns, have also volunteered to be considered for a national Canadian high-level radioactive waste dump (for 22 reactors).

Irradiated nuclear fuel storage pool fires risk catastrophic radioactivity releases

Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy StudiesThe U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has recently published a draft study, which concludes that the risk of a catastrophic irradiated nuclear fuel storage pool fire is vanishingly low. This conclusion seems to starkly contradict earlier NRC findings that pool storage risks are real, and should be dealt with.

The NRC draft study focuses on the risk of a severe earthquake impacting a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor storage pool (specificially, at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in PA). Ironically enough, NRC's draft conclusion clearly contradicts a warning issued a decade ago by its own current agency Chairwoman, Dr. Allison Macfarlane, who knows a thing or two about seismic risks: she is an internationally recognized Ph.D. geologist, who has long focused on radioactive waste risks. See below.)

NRC has granted the public a short 30 days to comment on this new 369 page draft. Deadline for public comments is currently Friday, August 2nd. Beyond Nuclear, and its environmental allies, are racing to meet this arbitrarily short deadline, to prepare comments which individuals and groups can endorse, or use to write their own. Watch for this in the near future.

However, there are strong voices who disagree with NRC's flip assurances of safety. Robert Alvarez (photo, left), a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, and a former senior advisor to the Energy Secretary during the Clinton administration, published a report in late June, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FOE), entitled Reducing the hazards of high-level radioactive waste in Southern California: Storage of nuclear waste from spent fuel at San Onofre. The report appeared a couple weeks after Edison International announced the permanent shutdown of San Onofre Units 2 & 3, under intense pressure from FOE and a widespread grassroots environmental network, due to the $2.5 billion, defective steam generator replacement boondoggle, which had put 8 million Southern Californians within a 50-mile radius at radiological risk. Alvarez concludes that the risk of catastrophic radioactivity releases from a high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pool fire at San Onofre, such as caused by a severe earthquake suddenly draining away the pool cooling water supply, are high. A large region downwind could be severely contaminated with radioactive Cesium-137 fallout, including lethal doses to thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.

Alvarez's study follows a 2003 report he and others (including the current NRC Chairwoman, Dr. Allison Macfarlane) co-authored, warning of the catastrophic risks of HLRW pool fires, and calling for the unloading of pools into not-risk-free, but safer, dry casks. Alvarez also published a report in May 2011, documenting the nationwide risk of storage pool fires, in light of the still-unfolding Fukushima catastrophe, which began a couple months earlier.

Just today, the New York Times and Agence France Press/Jiji have reported that steam at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 could either be due to a nuclear criticality in the molten core, or, as Alvarez (and Fairewinds Associates, Inc's Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen) have hypothesized, could be due to a nuclear criticality in the ruined HLRW storage pool itself.

Beyond Nuclear and a nationwide coalition of hundreds of environmental groups, representing all 50 states, have long advocated Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). HOSS calls not only for catastrophically risky pools to be emptied, but for dry cask storage safety, security, and environmental protection to be dramatically upgraded. Dry casks are currently badly designed, poorly fabricated, and not even required to withstand terrorist attacks.

What can you do about HLRW storage pool risks? Contact President Obama and your Senators and Representative (via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121), and urge HOSS as an interim alternative to a recently introduced Senate bill which would make matters worse, by rushing "Mobile Chernobyls" onto the roads, rails, and waterways, in a race for senseless "centralized interim storage" parking lot dumps targeted at already radiologically-burdened DOE sites and nuclear power plants, or, as an act of blatant environmental injustice or radioactive racism, Native American reservations.

"A little Hope" for stopping the Great Lakes radioactive waste DUD!

Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump billboard, seen by hundreds of thousands of Toronto commuters dailyThe struggle against the Canadian nuclear establishment's proposal(s) to bury so-called "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes from 20 reactors across Ontario, and perhaps even high-level radioactive wastes from 22 reactors across Canada, on the Lake Huron shore at or near the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, can be most daunting. Bruce "hosts" 9 reactors (8 operable reactors, 4 each at Bruce A and Bruce B, plus 1 pilot plant -- Douglas Point -- permanently shutdown), one of the single biggest nuclear power plants in the world. Bruce has also quietly incinerated most or all of Ontario's "low" level radioactive wastes for 40 years, with untold radiological emissions. All this, just 50 miles across Lake Huron from Michigan, and upstream from tens of millions of Americans, Canadians, and First Nations/Native Americans who draw their drinking water from the Great Lakes. In terms of the vast fortunes being made by Bruce Nuclear, as well as the harmful radiological releases occurring and radioactive wastes piling up, Bruce is making a killing, while getting away with murder.

Canadian federal decisionmakers have just closed the opportunity to register to speak out in opposition to the proposed "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive waste DGR (Deep Geologic Repository, or, more aptly, DUD -- Deep Underground Dump), and environmental assessment hearings will be held in September and October. As insane as this proposal is (would YOU bury poison next to your well?!, as the group Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump asks -- see photo, above left), the nuclear utility Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the nuclear utility comprised Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), and the Canadian Nuclear Safety (sic) Commission (CNSC) are racing, full steam ahead, to bury their forever deadly radioactive wastes within a mile of the Lake Huron shoreline.

But an antidote to such "nuclear madness" (à la Helen Caldicott's classic title) is at hand! In a recently published book, Tom Lawson of Port Hope, Ontario has shown that such insanity canbe stopped dead in its tracks. Crazy Caverns: How one small community challenged a technocrat juggernaut...and won! tells the inspiring story of a years-long struggle to prevent Canadian provincial and federal government decision makers from allowing Eldorado/Cameco's dumping of uranium processing wastes on the Lake Ontario shoreline.Tom has generously made the book available for free online -- simply click on the link to enjoy your free copy!

Tom has dedicated his "little book" to his wife Pat, as well as "to all those who accept responsibility as citizens in a free society, who agree that the best government is the one kept constantly on its toes by ordinary citizens with the courage to trust their common sense rather than the reassurances of the 'experts.' The experts do not know better than we know what is good for us."

Together, Tom and Pat Lawson, and their friends, neighbors, and colleagues in their tiny, picturesque, but badly contaminated community, have resisted the "biased bafflegab" of the "Pirates of Port Hope" headquartered in their town (Eldorado/Cameco, "Canada's National Uranium Company," as dubbed by Robert Bothwell's company-financed, dubious historical celebration of the firm, and the company's governmental henchmen). Together, this "small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" (à la Margaret Mead) did change the world for the better, by blocking the burial of "a million tons of radioactive and toxic waste 'out of sight, out of mind' under Port Hope's downtown waterfront."

Their important victory can inspire us now, as we struggle to resist OPG's, NWMO's, and CNSC's insane proposal(s) on the Lake Huron shore (more recently, incredibly, the vague specter of yet another DUD, this time for radioactive decommissioning wastes, has also reared its ugly head). In fact, Pat Lawson has spoken out strongly in recent years against the Bruce DUD(s), traveling in the nearby Georgian Bay, where her family has roots extending back many decades.

What can YOU do, right now, to help stop the Bruce DUDs?! Start by signing the Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump petition, and urge your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, etc. to do the same!

Paducah uranium enrichment facility suffers radioactive contamination incident 4 weeks after permanently shutting down

Paducah (uranium enrichment) Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Photo credit: U.S.E.C./U.S. Department of EnergyDespite being permanently shutdown on June 1st, the Paducah facility experienced a radioactivity contamination accident on June 28th, according to a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) incident report dated July 2nd. The radioactivity contamination accident stemmed from a water leak. Given the mountain of radioactive materials at Paducah, such radioactive contamination risks to the facility, the environment beyond, and the people who live there (some directly across dirt roads from the fence line, in a community already showing signs of significantly elevated cancer incidence and death rates) will continue far into the future, despite the facility's welcome permanent shutdown.

In a very real sense, the entire Paducah complex is a radioactive waste -- and toxic chemical -- site that now needs to be dealt with.