Archive for the ‘Toxic Waste Dump’ Category

June 20, 2011

Robert Alvarez
The Nation Magazine

In March 1992 George Galatis, a nuclear engineer at the Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford, Connecticut, became alarmed during a refueling. The reactor had to be shut down and the full radioactive core of the Unit 1 reactor, which held thousands of rods, was removed and then dumped into the spent fuel pool—a blatant violation of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) safety requirements.

The pool was already quite full. It wasn’t designed to suddenly hold those very radioactive and thermally hot fuel rods, which give off so much radiation that an unshielded person nearby would receive a lethal dose in seconds. In a previous incident around that time, a worker’s boots melted during this procedure. Because the pool could overheat, and possibly cause the pumps and cooling equipment to fail, the NRC had required reactor operators to wait for sixty-five hours before performing this task—with good reason. NRC studies over the past thirty years have consistently shown that even partial drainage of a spent fuel pool that exposed highly radioactive rods could release an enormous amount of radioactivity into the environment. Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with many years of experience at US nuclear reactors, describes this kind of accident as "Chernobyl on steroids."

Northeast Utility (which sold the Millstone reactors to Dominion Power in 2000) was standing to lose about $500,000 a day for replacement power if it followed the rules calling for a shutdown that would last more than two months. It had taken this shortcut for many years, while the NRC deliberately looked the other way.

By this time, the corporations that owned the nation’s nuclear reactors were stuffing about four times more spent fuel into storage pools than the pools were designed to accommodate, with the NRC’s blessing. It took several years for Galatis to force the NRC to take action at Millstone, at the expense of his career. His whistleblowing landed him on the cover of Time and embarrassed the NRC into performing a more thorough inspection of the reactor. The agency found a host of problems and ordered Unit 1 closed in 1996. The reactor was permanently shut down in 1998, but the spent fuel remains in a pool while the reactor is still being decommissioned, thirteen years later.

In the tradition of no good deed going unpunished, the Republican-controlled Congress, led by then–Senator Pete Domenici, was outraged over Millstone 1’s closure and made sure that the NRC would never do this again. In his autobiography, Domenici proudly notes that he sought to cut 700 jobs at the NRC in 1999, effectively gutting its regulatory efforts. "While many NRC requirements had questionable impact on safety," Domenici said, "their impact on the price of nuclear energy was far more obvious. This ‘tough love’ approach was necessary."

Domenici had his way. By 2000, the NRC sharply curtailed its oversight activities and became more of an enabler of nuclear power than a regulator. To this day, it remains overly dependent on nuclear industry self-reporting of problems.

Nearly twenty years after George Galatis began his lonely struggle to improve safety of spent fuel pools, the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan has once again turned a spotlight on this serious hazard in the United States. The explosions at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station left the spent fuel pools at three reactors exposed to the open sky, as Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company that owns the crippled power station, desperately try to keep them cool with thousands of tons of water. Spent fuel in one pool is believed to have caught fire and exploded. American reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production.

Nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in US spent fuel is cesium-137. The 4.5 billion curies of radioactive cesium-137 in US spent reactor fuel is roughly twenty times more than what was released by all worldwide atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. American spent fuel pools hold about fifteen to thirty times more cesium-137 than the 1986 Chernobyl accident released. For instance, the pool at the Vermont Yankee reactor, a BWR Mark I (a boiling-water reactor, the same design as the four crippled reactors in Fukushima), currently holds nearly three times the amount of spent fuel stored at Dai-Ichi’s Unit 4 reactor. The Millstone reactors, which have the largest spent-fuel inventory in the United States, hold over five times more radioactivity than the combined total in the pools at the four wrecked Dai-Ichi reactors.

Even though they contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, US spent nuclear fuel pools are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to merely protect them against the elements. Some are made from materials commonly used to house big-box stores and car dealerships.

The United States has thirty-one boiling water reactors with pools elevated several stories above ground, similar to those at Dai-Ichi. As in Japan, all spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants do not have steel-lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity. They are not required to have back-up generators to keep used fuel rods cool if offsite power is lost.

For nearly thirty years, NRC waste-storage requirements have remained contingent on the opening of a permanent waste repository that has yet to materialize. Now that the Obama administration has canceled plans to build a permanent deep-disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, spent fuel at the nation’s 104 reactors will continue to accumulate and is likely remain onsite for decades to come.

Domenici and the nuclear industry have often said that spent nuclear fuel could be stacked on a football field ten feet deep. There’s a problem with this assertion. First, it’s not remotely feasible and, most certainly, ill advised to squeeze the largest concentration of radioactivity on the planet onto a field. This would unleash chain reactions involving enough plutonium to fuel about 150,000 nuclear weapons, and could ignite a radiological fire that would cause long-term land contamination that would make Chernobyl and Fukushima look like pimples on a pumpkin. It would deliver lethal radiation doses to thousands if not millions of people hundreds of miles away. In other words, storing the entire nation’s spent fuel in one place would be a mistake.

The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl illustrated the damage cesium-137 can wreak. Nearly 200,000 residents from 187 settlements were permanently evacuated because of contamination by cesium-137. The total area of this radiation-control zone is huge. At more than 6,000 square miles, it is equal to about two-thirds the area of the State of New Jersey. During the following decade, the population of the region declined by almost half because of migration to areas of lower contamination.

On June 7 the Japanese government reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency that the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere during the first week of the accident was twice its previous estimate. The government failed to mention that an equally large amount was discharged into the sea, indicating that the Fukushima accident may have released more radioactivity into the environment than was released at Chernobyl. Around the same time, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan reported that cesium-137 contamination from the accident had rendered an area about seventeen times bigger than Manhattan uninhabitable.

I co-authored a report in 2003 that explained how a spent fuel pool fire in the United States could render an area uninhabitable that would be as much as sixty times larger than that created by the Chernobyl accident. If this were to happen at one of the Indian Point nuclear reactors—located about twenty-five miles from New York City—it could result in as many as 5,600 cancer deaths and $461 billion in damages.

The US government should promptly take steps to reduce these risks by placing all spent nuclear fuel older than five years in dry, hardened storage casks—something Germany did twenty-five years ago. It would take about ten years and cost $3.5–7 billion to accomplish. If the cost were transferred to energy consumers, the expenditure would result in a marginal increase of less than 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour for consumers of nuclear-generated electricity. Despite the destruction wreaked by the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan, the dry casks at the Fukushima site were unscathed.

Another payment option is available for securing spent nuclear fuel. Money could be allocated from $18.1 billion in unexpended funds already collected from consumers of nuclear-generated electricity under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to establish a disposal site for high-level radioactive wastes.

After more than fifty years, the quest for permanent nuclear waste disposal remains illusory. One thing, however, is clear, whether we like it or not: the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at US reactor sites for the indefinite future. In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree.

With a price tag of as much as $7 billion, the cost of fixing America’s nuclear vulnerabilities may sound high, especially given the heated budget debate occurring in Washington. But the price of doing too little is incalculable.

August 29, 2011

By Joe Conason
AlterNet

Most Americans have never heard of Harold Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low.

Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency-a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled "Fed Up!" Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a "dirty energy" state where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.

But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.

The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance-and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials-Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.

"We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that," Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. "Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied."

Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year, a local monthly in his hometown published the headline "Dallas’ Evil Genius" over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.

In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns-innocuously named Waste Control Systems-manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.

Now reporters for The Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.

In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.

This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry-who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state-voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state Legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to The Los Angeles Times’ report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an "independent" committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another "independent" political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)

According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into "an easy target. … It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough." But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the L.A. Times reporters, "This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site … . Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. … The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics."

As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too-to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.

Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.
© 2011 Creators.com

September 21, 2011

San Antonio Current Blog – The Que Que

Remember when we suggested Rick Perry was looking for stooges to help turn one of his top funder’s nuclear dumps into a national enterprise? Well, he had to look no further than former CPS Energy CEO Milton Lee. Perry’s new appointments to the state commission governing the two-state Texas-Vermont Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, announced last week, brought in a slate of new faces who will help determine the future of radioactive-waste dumping in Texas — and how much Dallas billionaire Perry donor Harold Simmons will make on the state’s favored Waste Control Specialists’ site in Andrews County.

Lee, who made his exit as CEO of San Antonio’s city-owned power utility last year, enjoyed a rocky tenure. One of the chief architects of the proposed expansion of the South Texas (nuclear) Project, now on hold as the Fukushima radioactive dust continues to settle, Lee helped implement years of aggravated attrition at CPS, forcing the exit of hundreds of employees and prompting a lawsuit from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers alleging dozens of cases of sex-, age-, and race-based discrimination.

Karen Hadden, director of the Austin-based SEED Coalition, said Lee’s appointment to the radwaste commission raises serious questions, given the gravity of decisions the commission will make in the coming years – namely, whether or not to make WCS the nation’s radwaste dumping grounds. Lee’s track record for environmental concern, she claims, is dubious, pointing to Lee’s role in helping form the Climate Policy Group, which consisted mostly of publicly-owned utilities heavily invested in coal power. Under Lee, the utility spent more than $120,000 lobbying against cap-and-trade policies through member dues to the CPG and trips to Washington D.C.

What’s notable, but unsurprising, is whom Perry failed to reappoint — Bobby Gregory, the commission’s persistent opposing voice, who had been a thorn in the side of radwaste expansionists. Perry had tried to coax Gregory off the radwaste commission by offering him a prestigious board-of-regents appointment, which would have conveniently required him to step down from the radwaste commission before it voted on whether to open up the West Texas dump to waste from an additional 34 states, something Gregory openly opposed (the commission ultimately passed the proposal).

Thu Sep 1, 2011

By Chris Baltimore, Peter Henderson and Karen Brooks
Reuters News

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Texas governor Rick Perry tried to sideline a state commissioner who opposed expanding the scope of a nuclear-waste landfill owned by one of the governor’s biggest political donors, Reuters has learned.

Bobby Gregory, owner of a wildlife ranch and landfill company south of Austin, had opposed a plan to let 36 states send nuclear waste to a 1,338-acre site in Andrews County.

On the other side of the issue was billionaire Harold Simmons and his company Waste Control Specialists LLC, which stood to gain millions of dollars from accepting out-of-state shipments. Simmons had donated over $1 million to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns.

A report in the Los Angeles Times in August examined the case of the Texas waste site and Perry’s ties to Simmons, a conservative who funded the Swift Boat campaign that helped torpedo John Kerry’s presidential bid.

Perry maintains his appointments are based on merit, and Simmons is inclined to help any conservative Republican, spokespeople for the two said.

In any case, the January vote by the eight-member Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission was key to the future profitability of the nuclear landfill.

Reuters has learned that late last year, after it became clear that the commission might block Waste Control’s request to truck in waste from around the country, Perry’s appointments chief, Teresa Spears, offered commissioner Gregory an alternative job — a prestigious appointment as a regent of a state university.

Under Texas law, Gregory could not hold two state-appointed positions requiring Senate approval at the same time, and so taking the regent job would have required him to leave the waste commission.

Gary Newton, a lawyer for Gregory’s company, Texas Disposal Systems, told Reuters his boss declined the offer. "There was a call from Ms. Spears. Bobby said they asked him if he was interested in this position. It was a Board of Regents position. He said ‘No, I’m not interested in that type of appointment,’ and declined," Newton said.

Gregory’s term as commissioner ended on August 31 this year, so Perry can now replace him. The waste commission voted in January to allow imports, though it still has to examine and approve specific applications to import waste on a case-by-case basis.

Perry spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said: "Governor Perry’s decisions are based solely on what’s in the best interests of the people of Texas."

The news of Perry’s intervention in the nuclear-waste issue comes as the governor is climbing the polls in the fight to take on President Barack Obama as the Republican candidate in the U.S. presidential election next year.

The Texan is running on a pro-jobs, pro-business platform. His political foes allege that he has granted favors to businesses owned by Perry donors (which wouldn’t necessarily be improper under Texas campaign-finance rules). The governor’s camp says he pushes the interests of all business in Texas.

FIGHT OVER IMPORTS

The WCS-operated site will store 2.3 million cubic feet of low-level nuclear waste, which is everything from cut up nuclear power plants, to radioactive detritus from hospitals and research labs — but not spent nuclear fuel itself.

A key issue for the economics of the nuclear waste site was whether it would be allowed to handle waste imported from states other than Vermont. Texas already had a "compact" deal to handle Vermont’s low-level waste.

In the latter part of 2010, Gregory was one of two people on the eight-member panel known to oppose allowing out of state imports. Two other members of the panel were Republican appointees from Vermont who favored the imports, but they were due to be replaced, presumably by Democratic appointees who would be in the opposition camp, early in 2011.

That could have swung the balance of the committee from 6-2 in favor to a 4-4 stalemate. Replacing Gregory would have given importation proponents the vote to carry the day.

After Gregory declined the job offer, the commission was called to vote on January 4, before the terms of the Vermont Republicans ended.

At a meeting that day, Gregory pleaded with his fellow commissioners to vote against importation.

"Without question in my mind this is too much, too soon, too fast, and I’ve added the caveat — if at all," Gregory told the meeting. "It is beyond preposterous, it is beyond absurd," that the commission should vote without reading over 5,000 public comments, he said.

The panel voted 5-2 in favor of allowing out-of-state imports, and the Texas legislature sealed the importation allowance into law in May.

The Andrews County dump could begin accepting waste late in 2011 or early in 2012.

Perry’s spokeswoman did not dispute the details of the regent offer, but would not comment on the donor’s ties to Perry or the governor’s intention to remove a waste specialist from a waste regulatory board in favor of overseeing a university. She broadly defended the process.

"Governor Perry makes appointments based on the qualifications of an individual and his or her ability to serve in Texans’ best interests, nothing more," Frazier said. "As you may know, the project you mention was approved overwhelmingly by the Texas legislature, and has the support of the local community," she added.

Simmons’ support of Perry is not unique and extends to Republican conservative candidates nationwide, said Chuck McDonald, spokesman for Waste Control Specialists, who dismissed any suggestion that Simmons’ donations had gained him any favors from Perry or state regulators.

"The record is pretty clear: If you are a conservative Republican seeking office, Mr. Simmons is going to support you," McDonald said. "Every congressman who comes dragging through Texas, if he stops in (Simmons’) office and he’s got an "R" by his name, he’s going to get money."

(Editing and additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Claudia Parsons and Michael Williams)

May 27, 2009

by LARAY POLK
Counterpunch

RadWaste and Texas’ Future

"It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we’ve got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license (to handle radioactive waste), and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied." –Harold Simmons, Valhi Inc.

How do you get people to vote for radioactive waste to be dumped in Texas in close proximity to the Ogallala and Dockum aquifers? And how do you also get the same community to agree to bankroll the project’s $75 million buildout costs? You sell it as a prosperity issue.

The promise of future prosperity is more hopeful than discussing point-blank realities. Namely, that the source of prosperity is a dumpsite in west Texas, near the border of New Mexico, that has the potential for receiving varying grades of radioactive waste from 36 states. And the geographical area in question has three inherent properties that have scientists, engineers and activists worried: red clay, aquifers and high winds.

On May 9, voters from Andrews County went to the booth to participate in a bond election, paid for by Waste Control Specialists (WCS), to decide whether or not their county will pay for such a dumpsite. 642 people voted affirmative and 639 against.

A discrepancy of three votes has decided a crucial decision that could have far-ranging affects on all present and future residents of Texas and beyond. According to business interests involved in the project, financing through normal channels would require a two to three year wait in the current economic downturn. With Andrews County paying for the initial costs, construction is planned to begin this summer.

The preliminary funding hurdle has been cleared, but central to receiving radioactive waste is a license granted by state regulators. Earlier this year, WCS received their license from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). It allows them to accept waste from Texas and Vermont as well as from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Waste accepted from the DOE may originate from anywhere in the country.

Proper licensing coupled with immediate financing is a boon for WCS. If they proceed as planned, they will capitalize on South Carolina’s decision in July to shutter its low-level radioactive waste operations. The Texas site stands to profit by absorbing the radioactive waste from the 36 states that South Carolina will no longer be servicing.

And the recent move by the Obama administration to put a hold on the Yucca Mountain repository may leave the door open for the proposed Texas dumpsite to become an alternative location for nuclear reactor waste that had been previously destined for Nevada.

While WCS is licensed to accept Class A, B, and C waste (A is the least hazardous), they currently cannot accept waste outside the compact with Vermont. That would require the approval of eight compact commissioners, six from Texas and two from Vermont.

This arrangement, however, is rife with conflicts of interest. The commissioners in Texas are appointed by Gov. Rick Perry. WCS is owned by Valhi. Valhi is owned by Harold Simmons, a major Republican party and Perry donor. Other campaign contributions include Simmons’ financial support for attack ads on the two most recent Democratic presidential candidates. He helped fund both the swiftboating of John Kerry and the ads by the American Issues Project that questioned Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers.

Valhi’s rush to buildout in Andrews County, ironically, is tied to receiving federal stimulus money for processing the PCBs from the Hudson River.

***

This issue of an expanding radioactive waste dumpsite and corollary ones will not be going away any time soon as Texas has its own dependency on such sites. In addition to being home to two commercial nuclear reactors, eight additional entities are currently seeking licenses to build reactors in Texas.

WCS has been licensed to operate Andrews County’s radioactive waste dumpsite for 15 years. In that length of time, varying grades of radioactive refuse could make its way underground in Texas, releasing radionuclides into the Ogallala and Dockum aquifers. The voters of Andrews County have spoken but theirs should not be the final voice on this issue.

For further reading and updates, see No Bonds for Billionaires and Nuke Free Texas.

LARAY POLK is a multimedia artist and writer who lives in Dallas,Texas. She can be contacted at laraypolk(at)me.com.