Radioactive steam generators from San Onofre, CA heavy haul trucked through 3 States, dumped in UT

The almost 800,000-pound piece of "slightly radioactive" steel from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will be moving to a disposal site in Utah through California and Nevada. / KCBSAs reported by KCBS News, a radioactive steam generator has been heavy haul trucked from the southern CA coast, across NV and into UT, before being dumped at the EnergySolutions "EnviroCare" so-called "low" level radioactive waste dump in Clive, UT, not far from the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation.

The heavy haul truck trailer measured 400 feet long. Heavy haul truck shipments are usually of much shorter duration, as they can only travel at speeds in the single digits of miles per hour.

This shipment's route was kept secret for "security reasons," officials said.

Although Southern California Edison claims little to no radiological risk associated with the shipment, a dental x-ray per hour at a distance of 5 to 10 feet still represents a gamma ray hazard for workers, inspectors, innocent bystanders, and passers by. As NAS has long affirmed, any exposure to radioactivity carries a health risk for cancer, and these risks accumulate over a lifetime.

And, as documented by Dr. Gordon Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility regarding radioactive steam generators at Bruce Nuclear Complex in Ontario, the radioactive contaminants inside steam generators are significantly hazardous.

As mentioned in the news coverage, the sheer size of the load is also a hazard. At 800,000 pounds, or 400 tons, this shipment is among the heaviest out there on the roads. In 2003, a 290 ton radioactive reactor pressure vessel traveling from northern MI to SC by train so damaged the tracks in SE MI, as well as in the Carolinas, that follow on trains derailed in its wake.

Update, Easter Day, 2013:

A 500-600 ton load dropped by Entergy at its Arkansas Nuclear One plant has killed one worker and injured 8.

NRC's Nuke Waste Confidence EIS will delay reactor licenses for at least two years!

Cover of Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High"The five Commissioners who direct the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have just ordered NRC Staff to carry out an expedited, two-year long Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process to revise the agency's Nuclear Waste Confidence Decision (NWCD) and Rule. Critics have charged the NWCD is a confidence game, which for decades has prevented environmental opponents of new reactor construction/operation licenses, as well as old reactor license extensions, from raising high-level radioactive waste generation/storage concerns during NRC licensing proceedings, or even in the federal courts. 

But on June 8th, the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed with a coalition of state attorneys general (from NY, CT, NJ, and VT) and environmental groups (including BREDL, NRDC, Riverkeeper and SACE) that NRC's Nuclear Waste Confidence violated the National Environmental Policy Act. In effect, the court ruling, which NRC decided not to appeal, ordered the agency to carry out a decades-overdue EIS on the risks of extended (for decades, centuries, or forever) high-level radioactive waste storage at reactor sites, if a permanent repository is never opened.

This means at least a two year delay in any finalization of NRC licensing decisions for new reactors, or license extensions at old reactors, until this EIS process and NWCD revision are completed. However, all other aspects of the NRC licensing proceedings can still be finalized and dispensed with in the meantime, taking NRC rubberstamps of reactor licenses right up to the edge, just shy of finalization. Beyond Nuclear has raised Nuke Waste Con Game contentions in opposition to two proposed new reactors (Fermi 3 in MI, and Grand Gulf 2 in LA), as well as to two old reactor license extensions (Davis-Besse, OH, and Grand Gulf 1, LA). An environmental coalition has raised similar contentions against all three dozen new reactor construction/operation, and old reactor extension, licenses across the U.S.

Disconcertingly, the NRC Commissioners' press release announcing this EIS launch also stated: "The Commission said the staff should draw on the agency’s 'long, rich history' with waste confidence determinations as well as work performed by other agencies, such as environmental assessments, technical studies and reports addressing the impacts of transportation and consolidated storage of spent fuel."

This seems to indicate that the NRC has joined with the likes of President Obama's and Energy Secretary Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future in pushing for "consolidated interim storage" instead of "hardened on-site storage" of high-level radioactive waste. This should come as no surprise, as NRC Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane served on the BRC.

Legislation has already been introduced on Capitol Hill that would launch and fund "consolidated interim storage."U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman will hold a hearing on such legislation on Sept. 12th. Witnesses will include two other members of the BRC -- one of its co-chairmen, General Brent Scrowcroft, and former NRC Chairman Richard Meserve -- as well as Pete Lyons, himself a former NRC Commissioner, and now director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, mandated to promote nuclear power, and in fact host agency for the BRC. Another witness is the head of Constellation Nuclear, recently acquired by Exelon Nuclear, which would love nothing more than transferring title -- and liability -- for high-level radioactive waste to the American taxpayer, once it begins moving by road, rail, and/or barge, in unprecedented shipment numbers, toward "consolidated interim storage." The final witness is Geoff Fettus, the nuclear attorney at NRDC who helped lead the environmental coalition's victory at the DC Court of Appeals on June 8th. 

Beyond Nuclear has already issued action alerts against the juggernaut revving its engines on Capitol Hill. We have also joined with the likes of Nuclear Energy Information Service, to hold a "Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High" conference Dec. 1-3 in Chicago. Kevin Kamps will speak about federal legislative threats on the high-level radioactive waste front, and what you can do about them. The grassroots environmental movement has held off the "Mobile Chernobyl" for 20 years, but this may be the most challenging fight yet in 2013. The Nuke Waste Con EIS also means we have to generate large volumes of public comments, so this conference will be a a launching pad for doing so. Please consider attending, and help spread the word!

For more information on "The Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High," see our pamphlet by that title (the pamphlet's cover is reproduced above, left), as well as the rest of Beyond Nuclear's Radioactive Waste website section.

Beyond Nuclear discusses bi-national radioactive waste risks on Sarnia, Ontario radio interview

On the 26th annual commemoration of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe (April 26, 2012), Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps discussed the risks of a proposed radioactive waste dump on the Lake Huron shoreline at Bruce Nuclear Complex with radio station CHOK, located in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. Sarnia is downstream of Bruce, and is located just across the narrow and shallow St. Clair River from Port Huron, Michigan, U.S.A. Kevin had been the featured speaker the previous evening after a showing of "Into Eternity" at a meeting of the Blue Water Sierra Club at Port Huron city hall.

Last year, on March 23, 2011 (just 11 days after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe in Japan began), Kevin also spoke with CHOK about the risks of Bruce Nuclear's proposed shipment of radioactive steam generators by boat right down the St. Clair River between Port Huron and Sarnia. This shipment has been held off by determined resistance stretching from the Great Lakes to Europe. CHOK broke the news story about the proposed shipment in spring 2010.

Nuclear transport risks at the "front end" of the uranium fuel chain

While the nuclear materials at the "front end" of the uranium fuel chain are not radioactive wastes per se, they still involve risks -- both toxic chemical, as well as radiological -- during their transport. The WISE Uranium Project (World Information Service on Energy) has documented general uranium transport accidents, as well as transport risks and accidents specifically involving uranium hexafluoride. Miles Goldstick wrote a book in 1991 entitled The Hex Connection: Some Problems and Hazards Associated with the Transportation of Uranium Hexafluoride.

TransCanada Pipelines also a large-scale radioactive waste generator!

Bruce nuclear power plant, part owned by TransCanada PipelinesCongratulations to environmental allies who have successfully pressured the Obama administration to postpone -- and hopefully ultimately cancel -- TransCanada Pipelines' proposed Keystone XL Pipeline for Canadian tar sands crude oil. But tar sands crude oil isn't the only "dirty, dangerous, and expensive" energy source TransCanada dabbles with. According to its website, it also owns 48.8% of the 3,000 Megawatt-electric (MW-e) Bruce A nuclear power plant, and 31.6% of the 3,200 MW-e Bruce B nuclear power plant. Bruce -- a 9 reactor and radioactive waste complex located in Ontario on the shore of Lake Huron just 50 miles from Michigan -- is the largest nuclear power plant in the Western Hemisphere, and the second biggest in the world. TransCanada entered the nuclear power business despite warnings by NIRS in late 2002 about serious financial and environmental risks.

A primary bone of contention over the Keystone XL pipeline is its proposed route over the irreplacable Ogallala Aquifer; the Waste Control Specialists radioactive waste dump in Texas also threatens the Ogallala. For its part, TransCanada's Bruce nuclear complex already comprises one of the biggest concentrations of radioactive waste in the world, embroiled in a raging controversy over proposed radioactive waste shipments on the Great Lakes (a total of 64 radioactively contaminated steam generators), and targeted to become a permanent burial dump for "low" and "intermediate" level radioactive wastes from a whopping 20 reactors across Ontario -- the "Deep Underground Dump," or DUD, as Greenpeace Canada's Dave Martin dubbed it. The DUD would be located just a half mile from the Lake Huron shoreline. The Great Lakes provide drinking water for 40 million people in the U.S., Canada, and numerous Native American First Nations.