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The billionaire "King of Superfund Sites" wants to open a giant radioactive dump in West Texas…what could go wrong?

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Tue Mar. 29, 2011

By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones Magazine

The nuclear crisis in Japan has provided a vivid reminder that one of the biggest conundrums of atomic power is what do do with all of the resulting radioactive waste. Harold Simmons believes he’s found an answer. The Texas billionaire and corporate raider is opening a nuclear waste dump in West Texas, despite objections from environmentalists and the state’s own experts. One of the Lone Star State’s largest donors to Republican causes, Simmons expects his that privately-owned site will become the nation’s most sought after radioactive waste repository.

The reclusive, litigious 79-year-old made his personal fortune from garbage collection, drug stores, metals, and chemicals. His net worth is valued at $5.7 billion, making him the 55th richest American, according to Forbes. He’s shared his money—more than $10 million of it—with conservative politicians and causes, bankrolling attack ads against John Kerry and Barack Obama and giving Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry at least $1.2 million. He has been fined for violating campaign donation limits and outed by one of his daughters for paying her to let him make political contributions in her name. He’s been called the "King of Superfund Sites" for his work disposing of hazardous waste. Last year, D Magazine named him "Dallas’ most evil genius."

Much of Simmons’ genius resides in how he’s leveraged his political investments. In 1995, he bought a hazardous waste disposal company, Waste Control Specialists, and set about converting an isolated spot in Andrews County into a nuclear waste dump. After six years of lobbying the state legislature, WCS convinced it to pass a law authorizing private companies to be licensed to handle radioactive waste.

Two licenses sought by WCS would allow it to accept a total of 60 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from federal and state sources, including nuclear reactors, weapons programs, and hospitals. (That’s roughly enough waste to fill half of Cowboys Stadium.) The licenses didn’t need detailed approval from federal nuclear regulators because the dump wouldn’t handle the highest grades of radioactive waste; unlike the proposed Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada, for example, the 1,338-acre WCS dump can’t accept spent nuclear fuel rods.

Concerned that radioactive material from the dump could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the state environmental commission quit rather than approve its license.

State engineers and geologists strongly objected to licensing the the dump. Concerned that radioactive material could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality resigned rather than sign off on the licenses. In a 2007 memo, four TCEQ engineers and geologists concluded that the site’s proximity to the water table "makes groundwater intrusion into the disposal units highly likely" and suggested that it not be approved. One of the resigned staffers, an engineer named Encarnacion Serna, told the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder that the site’s geology made it unfit for storing nuclear waste. Nevertheless, he explained, "I started getting the idea that these people are going to license this thing no matter what. I felt that in clear conscience I couldn’t grant a license with what was being proposed."

In 2008, TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle quit the agency only to become a $150,000-a-year lobbyist for WCS. The company’s licenses to store radioactive waste were approved in May 2008 and September 2009. "Even the mafia was more circumspect than this," Glenn Lewis, one of the TCEQ whistleblowers, told the Observer at the time. "It just shows that…big money and a lot of political power won once again."

WCS has defended the science behind its plan. "The site is the ideal location for disposing of low-level radioactive waste—its arid climate and unique geologic formation make it perfectly qualified," CEO William Lindquist wrote early last year in response to an investigative piece in D Magazine. Linidquist stated that the site is separated from the nearest aquifer by 400 feet of nearly impermeable clay. "Put simply, no contamination of this aquifer from the WCS site is possible." (WCS did not return a call from Mother Jones.)

With his license to operate in hand, Simmons began an audacious campaign to expand the dump site from a mostly local operation into one that could eventually become the largest of its kind in the country. A huge market for radioactive waste disposal was just waiting to be tapped: 36 states lack a permanent place to store their radioactive cast-offs. This has long been an obstacle for building new nuclear power plants; some have had their permits held up over the issue. Only Vermont had a deal to dispose of its nuclear waste in Texas, so Simmons began lobbying to amend the nearly 20-year-old compact with the Green Mountain State to allow other states to also send their radioactive waste to the WCS site.

The decision to alter the compact rested with the seven members of the obscure Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, six of whom had been appointed by Gov. Perry, one of the largest recipients of Simmons’ campaign cash. A peculiar legal loophole in the Texas-Vermont compact allows the commission, by a majority vote, to allow radioactive waste imports from other states. Despite opposition to that idea from everyone from Bass Unlimited to the NAACP, in January the commission approved a process for accepting the out-of-state nuclear material. Any state can now petition the commission to have its radioactive waste buried in Texas.

There’s another big reason why this was a huge win for Simmons: The compact allows him to get paid for burying other states’ nuclear trash while outsourcing much of the risk to Texas taxpayers. Though the state will receive a cut of disposal fees and $36 million to cover "corrective action" and "post-closure" expenses, it will have to bear any other cleanup costs on its own. According to a report by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission: "Potential future contamination [from the waste] could not only have a severe impact to the environment and human health, but to the State, which bears the ultimate financial responsibility for compact waste disposal facility site."

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have sued to overturn WCS’s nuclear disposal licenses. But the controversy that surrounds the deal hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from getting behind it. "This is a major milestone," Ralph Andersen, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s senior director of radiation, safety, and environmental protection, told the Wall Street Journal. "It’s going to provide much needed space."

Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips at jharkinson (at) motherjones (dot) com. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Josh Harkinson’s RSS feed.

March 28, 2011

By JOHN M. BRODER, MATTHEW L. WALD and TOM ZELLER Jr.
New York Times

WASHINGTON — American nuclear safety regulators, using a complex mathematical technique, determined that the simultaneous failure of both emergency shutdown systems that are designed to prevent a core meltdown was so unlikely that it would happen once every 17,000 years.

The American people, and the regulators whose job it is to protect them from a catastrophic nuclear accident, are watching the unfolding events at a complex of crippled reactors in Japan with foreboding and an overriding question: Can it happen here?

The answer — probably not — from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is meant to reassure. But as the New Jersey accidents in 1983, which did not result in any core damage or release of radiation, show, no one can predict what might upend all the computer models, emergency planning and backup systems designed to eliminate those narrow theoretical probabilities or mitigate their effects.

"We can never say that that could never happen here," said Anthony R. Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main trade association. "It doesn’t matter how you get there, whether it’s a hurricane, whether it’s a tsunami, whether it’s a seismic event, whether it’s a terrorist attack, whether it’s a cyberattack, whether it’s operator error, or some other failure in the plant — it doesn’t matter. We have to be prepared to deal with those events."

The threats considered most serious by nuclear engineers are problems that lead to a loss of power. Lack of power to run cooling systems for the reactor core and for spent-fuel ponds led to the explosions and release of radiation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan.

American nuclear facilities have backup power systems, and backups to those. All plants are required to have batteries to provide power in the event of a loss of power and failure of backup generators. In the United States, 93 of the 104 operating reactors have batteries capable of providing power for four hours; the other 11 have eight-hour batteries. Fukushima had eight-hour batteries. It wasn’t enough

Read more at the New York Times website.

Mar-25-2011

Salem-News.com

Why Aren"t Japanese and American Citizens Getting All the Facts? "Extreme" Step Seen As Indication of Much Higher Radiation Levels Than Revealed So Far by NRC, Japanese Government.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – Three groups – Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) – announced today that they have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get to the bottom of what led the U.S. government to call for a 50-mile evacuation radius for Americans near the Japanese reactor crisis in Fukushima.

The FOIA requests filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are available online at http://foe.org/sites/default/files/FOE-NIRS-PSR-RadiationFOIA-3-22-11.pdf. The three groups are not satisfied that the incomplete summary provided so far by the DOE at http://www.energy.gov/news/10194.htm provides the full picture of the scale of the radiation.

On March 16, 2011, NRC Commissioner Gregory B. Jazcko told Congress that he was recommending the 50-mile evacuation radius. (See http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/organization/commission/comm-gregory-jaczko/0317nrc-transcript-jaczko.pdf.) The scope of the recommended evacuation is highly unusual and suggestive of extraordinarily high radiation levels in excess of those reported to the public in Japan and the U.S., the three groups said. In the U.S., nuclear reactor licensees and local governments are only asked to provide for evacuation out to 10 miles.

As concerns grow about food and water contamination in Japan, the three groups filing the FOIA request are seeking to determine the answer to this key question: What made Jaczko exceed the limits of his own agency"s regulations by five times?

Tom Clements, Southeastern nuclear campaign coordinator, Friends of the Earth, said: "The radiation monitoring information being collected by the U.S. Government in Japan is of urgent interest to the public in the U.S. and internationally and we expect an expedited response to the FOIA request. If the full data set is not immediately released, the government can rightly be accused of attempting to cover up the radiation threat posed by the disaster. This would severely undermine regulators" credibility."

Michael Mariotte, executive director, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Takoma Park, MD, said: "By recommending a 50-mile evacuation zone for U.S. residents, NRC Chairman Jaczko gave a strong signal that the Fukushima accident was much worse than reported by the Japanese government and the utility. We believe that he was getting information about the severity of the accident from airborne radiation measurements taken by U.S. Department of Energy aircraft. But neither DOE nor the NRC has published those measurements in full."

Attorney Diane Curran of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP, who filed the FOIA request for the groups, said: "We think the American and Japanese public have a right to see the complete details of the Fukushima radiation data and, therefore, we have requested the NRC and the DOE to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act. If necessary, we are prepared to go to federal court to get the uncensored set of measurements."

As the FOIA request explains, the three groups "seek expedited release" of the requested information, "so that they may timely inform their members and the general public about the unfolding events at the Fukushima reactors, including the significance of the public health and environmental threat posed by radiation releases from the Fukushima reactors. Requesters believe that requested disclosures will do a great deal to fill currently existing information gaps and resolve inconsistencies in the currently available reports about the severity of the Japanese radiological releases."

The groups also contend that expedited release of the information is justified in order to allow them to participate in and comment on any proceedings the federal government may undertake to evaluate the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident, including the 90-day review of the safety of U.S. reactors recently announced by the NRC. According to the FOIA request letter, a better understanding of the severity of the Fukushima releases is "essential to Requesters" ability to evaluate and participate in any such review."

Sun Mar 27, 2011

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Yoko Kubota
Reuters News

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan appeared resigned on Monday to a long fight to contain the world’s most dangerous atomic crisis in 25 years after high radiation levels complicated work at its crippled nuclear plant.

Engineers have been battling to control the six-reactor Fukushima complex since it was damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that also left more than 27,000 people dead or missing across Japan’s devastated northeast.

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake rocked the region on Monday, the latest in a series of aftershocks, and officials warned it would trigger a 50-cm (two feet) tsunami wave.

Radiation at the nuclear plant has soared in recent days. Latest readings on Sunday showed contamination 100,000 times normal in water at reactor No. 2 and 1,850 times normal in the nearby sea.

Those were the most alarming levels since the crisis began.

"I think maybe the situation is much more serious than we were led to believe," said one expert, Najmedin Meshkati, of the University of Southern California, adding it may take weeks to stabilize the situation and the United Nations should step in.

"This is far beyond what one nation can handle – it needs to be bumped up to the U.N. Security Council. In my humble opinion, this is more important than the Libya no fly zone."

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. has conceded it faces a protracted and uncertain operation to contain overheating fuel rods and avert a meltdown.

"Regrettably, we don’t have a concrete schedule at the moment to enable us to say in how many months or years (the crisis will be over)," TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said in the latest of round-the-clock briefings the company holds.

Though experts said radiation in the Pacific waters will quickly dissipate, the levels at the site are clearly dangerous, and the 450 or so engineers there have won admiration and sympathy around the world for their bravery and sense of duty.

The nuclear crisis is an especially sensitive subject for Japanese given they are the only nation to have been hit by atomic bombs, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Last week, two workers at Fukushima were injured with radiation burns to their legs after water seeped over their shoes, and on Sunday engineers had to abandon reactor No. 2 after the new reading.

Further afield, beyond the evacuation zone around Fukushima, there has been plenty of evidence of radiation — from tap water in Tokyo 240 km (150 miles) south of the nuclear facility to particles found as far away as Iceland.

In the latest find, traces of radioactive iodine turned up in rainwater samples in Massachusetts in the United States, but health officials there said they posed no threat.

Japanese officials and international nuclear experts have generally said the levels away from the plant are not dangerous for humans, who anyway face comparable radiation doses on a daily basis from natural substances, X-rays or plane flights.

CHERNOBYL ECHOES

Two of the plant’s six reactors are now seen as safe but the other four are volatile, sometimes emitting steam and smoke.

TEPCO officials indicated the contaminated water is probably coming from inside the reactors rather than from pools of spent fuel rods outside.

Experts are anxious to find out whether the reactor cores are broken and leaking, as that could lead to a meltdown.

One long-term solution may be to entomb the Fukushima reactors in sand and concrete as happened at Chernobyl, Ukraine, after the 1986 disaster that was the world’s worst.

The Japan crisis has prompted a reassessment of nuclear power across the world. It had its most direct political impact yet in foreign politics in Germany at the weekend.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats lost control of Germany’s most prosperous state, Baden-Wuerttemberg, as anti-nuclear sentiment benefited her opponents in a regional vote.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has kept a low profile during the crisis, but may face awkward questions after Kyodo news agency said his visit to the region the day after the disaster delayed TEPCO’S response to the unfolding situation.

"The process to release the steam was delayed due to the premier’s visit," because the power company feared Kan could be exposed to radiation, it quoted an unnamed government source as saying.

The nuclear crisis has compounded Japan’s agony after the magnitude 9.0 quake and massive tsunami devastated its north east coast, turning whole towns into apocalyptic-looking landscapes of mud and debris.

The latest death toll was 10,804 people, with 16,244 still missing 17 days after the disaster. About a quarter of a million people are living in shelters.

Damage could top $300 billion, making it the world’s costliest natural disaster.

(Additional reporting by Chizu Nomiyama, Elaine Lies and Shinichi Saoshiro in Tokyo, Gerard Wynn in London and Alister Doyle in Oslo, Scott DiSavino in New York, Christiaan Hetzner in Stuttgart; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; editing by Bill Tarrant)

© Thomson Reuters 2011 All rights reserved.

March 27, 2011

By Katheleen Conti, Staff
Boston Globe

Low levels of radioactive iodine likely resulting from the nuclear accident in Japan have been detected in a sample of rainwater in Massachusetts, state health officials said today.

The amounts of radioiodine are very low concentrations and should have no impact on state drinking water supplies, John Auerbach, commissioner of the Department of Public Health, told reporters.

The rain sample was taken during the past week in Boston as part of regular monitoring of radioactivity on the environment by the US Environmental Protection Agency. No detectable increases in radiation have been discovered in the air, Auerbach said, and there are no expected public health concerns.

"The drinking water supply in Massachusetts is unaffected by this short-term, slight elevation in radiation," he said. "However, we will carefully monitor the drinking water as we exercise an abundance of caution."

Radioiodine is a by-product of nuclear energy production and has a half-life of eight days, Auerbach said at a press conference this afternoon at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain. Half-life means that only half of the level of radiation will be present in eight days, and so on until it completely dissipates.

"That means it should be undetectable in a matter of weeks, assuming that there is no new source of radiation exposure," he said.

Drinking water samples taken last week from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs showed no detectable levels of radioiodine. Precautionary samplings from 12 other water supply sources across the state were taken today. Results are expected over the next several days.

Similar levels of radiation in rainwater samples have been found in other states, including California, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Auerbach said.

The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11 seriously damaged the six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, which continues to spew radiation into the atmosphere and the sea.

Harmless traces of radiation from the stricken nuclear complex in Japan have been detected wafting over the East Coast of the United States, the New York Times reported last week. The paper cited European officials who have tracked the radioactive plume as it has drifted eastward on prevailing winds from Japan – first to the West Coast and now over the East Coast and the Atlantic, moving toward Europe. The plume’s radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey of thousands of miles and that – at least for now, with concentrations so low – its presence will have no health consequences in the United States, the paper reported.