Radiation leakage in Delhi panics nuclear establishment
The News | April 11, 2010
NEW DELHI: The discovery of at least nine powerful Cobalt-60 sources of nuclear radiation, which have fatally infected five people in a West Delhi industrial area, has sent shock waves among the local population as well as nuclear establishment in India.
Experts fear that many more people might have been exposed to strong radiation and would be in need of immediate medical attention.
Panic gripped Mayapuri industrial locality after news broke out that exposure to a ‘mysterious shining object’ had resulted in the emergence of strange symptoms in the owner of a scrap shop who was admitted to hospital on 4th April. India’s scientific community was alerted once the doctors diagnosed the symptoms as a result of exposure to strong doses of nuclear radiation. Nuclear and medical experts from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the Narora Atomic Power Plant in Uttar Pradesh were rushed to the site to scan the area and help doctors confirm the diagnosis.
Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope of Cobalt was confirmed as the source of radiation.
According to the experts, this is not the first incident when radioactive material has found its way to the unauthorised places in India raising the specter of it being used in nuclear terrorism.
Security at Indian nuclear facilities has been breached time and again when nuclear material was stolen from nuclear installations. As late as Nov 2000 Indian Police seized 57 pounds of Uranium and arrested two persons for illicit trafficking of radioactive material. Lack of security at the Indian nuclear plants was underscored recently when on 25 Nov 2009 some rogue elements at the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karnataka, laced the drinking water with Tritium , contaminating at least 90 employees.
Death of a nuclear scientist, under mysterious circumstances at Kaiga in Jun 2009 has further raised the issue of security of personnel at the highly sensitive nuclear reactors of India, particularly those chosen to remain outside of the IAEA scrutiny.
The discovery of clandestine radioactive material in Delhi only serves to highlight the poor state of affairs at the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), the authority for controlling the security of radioactive material in India , say analysts.
Paying Now for the Next Three Mile Island
By HARVEY WASSERMAN | March 29, 2010
As radiation poured from 3 Mile Island 31 years ago this week, utility executives rested easy.
They knew that no matter how many people their errant nuke killed, and no matter how much property it destroyed, they would not be held liable.
Today this same class of executives demands untold taxpayer billions to build still more TMIs. No matter how many meltdowns they cause, and how much havoc they visit down on the public, they still believe they’re above the law.
Fueled with more than $600 million public relations slush money, they demand a risk-free “renaissance” financed by you and yours.
AS IF!
In 1980 I reported from central Pennsylvania on the dead and dying one year after. Dozens of interviews documented a horrifying range of radiation-related diseases including cancer, leukemia, birth defects, still births, malformations, sterility, heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, skin lesions, hair loss, a metallic taste and much more. As reported by the Baltimore News-American among others, such ailments also ripped through the animal population.
To this day no one knows how much radiation was released at the 1979 TMI accident, where it went or whom it harmed. The official line that “no one was killed” is arguably the biggest lie ever told in US industrial history. It is to public health what the promise of power “too cheap to meter” was to public finance.
It parallels Soviet lies about the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl, whose health effects continue to skyrocket. A devastating summary report issued by the New York Academy of Sciences (Yablokov, Nesterenko & Nesterenko: Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People & the Environment) says at least 980,000 people are likely to die from the fallout.
That would be a small fraction of the casualties had 9/11 terrorists dived into the two reactors at New York’s Indian Point instead of hitting the World Trade Center.
In a time of deep financial stress, it also counts that the TMI accident turned a $900 million asset into a $2 billion liability in a matter of minutes. Chernobyl has cost Belarus and Ukraine at least $500 billion and counting. And the price tag on a major meltdown anywhere in the US is virtually beyond calculation.
Thus those who think a flood of new nukes will flow unimpeded into the American pocketbook haven’t been paying attention:
1) Four northeastern nukes—in Vermont, New Jersey and the two at Indian Point— are under intense public pressure to shut within the next two years. Numerous other elderly reactors are likely to go down long before any new nukes could come on line.
2) French President Sarkozy is demanding that world financial institutions buy a bevy of new French-built reactors. But huge delays and cost-overruns at French projects in Finland and France itself have made the investment community wary to say the least, thus prompting his foot-stomping.
3) Documents leaked from inside France’s national utility EDF indicate cost-cutting has made the new French reactor design exceedingly prone to explosion, further unsettling potential investors.
4) The future of new US reactor construction hinges on massive loan guarantees and handouts. The public number is $54 billion, but the Nuclear Information & Resource Service says the real bill could top a trillion.
5) In the polarized, cost-conscious wake of the health care bill, and the apparent demise of cap and trade as a centerpiece of climate legislation, the idea of such huge sums flowing to a deeply polarizing energy source has become increasingly problematic. Without a clear trade-off for fossil/nuclear giveaways, and with stiffening resistance from the rightist National Taxpayers Union, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, the nuke bonanza is anything but certain. The technology may now, in fact, be “too expensive to matter.”
6) An attempt by Entergy to shift six reactors into an asset-free corporate shell has been nixed by New York authorities, leaving liability for Vermont Yankee, Indian Point and other northeastern nukes in limbo.
7) As elderly nukes stumble toward oblivion, various funds allegedly set aside for decommissioning may be significantly under-funded, deeply exacerbating the financial battles that now encircle the industry.
8) As a lame duck, George W. Bush signed agreements apparently obligating the feds to assume responsibility for enough radioactive waste to fill two of the cancelled Yucca Mountain waste dumps. The complete lack of even one such facility means the potential taxpayer bill is beyond meaningful calculation.
9) Above all the exemption from liability for a major accident—first perpetrated by a pro-nuke Congress in 1957—remains the largest potential cost to us all. Renewed by Bush in 2005, some believe the statute is clearly unconstitutional.
To this day the families of those harmed by radiation at Three Mile Island have been denied the right to make their case in federal court.
But now the shoe is on the other foot.
Desperate for cash, the nuclear industry wants us all to pay hundreds of billions for the joy of living downwind from still more 3 Mile Islands for which they intend to assume NO liability.
They want our money AND our lives.
From central Pennsylvania after 31 years, the message is clear: Just Say NO!
Germany to extend nuclear plant phase-out by 28 years
Press TV – March 28, 2010
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government is pushing to extend the lifespan of some of the country’s nuclear power plants to 60 years, amid opposition.
The new plans come a week after an agreement between the environment and finance ministries, backed by the government, to add 20 more years to a previous compromise which had established that all of the countries’ nuclear power plants be shut down by 2022.
The opposition has slammed the move, arguing that this would endanger the safety of citizens as well as slowing down the progress in the filed of renewable energy sources.
In an interview published last Friday in the Munich-based daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen said a 28-year extension of the previous phase-out plans could have the last nuclear power plant go off the grid in 2050.
Roettgen stressed that the government was just at the stage of considering all its options, with evaluators now discussing scenarios of extending the phase-out by four, 12, 20 and 28 years.
The paper criticized the government for treating the power plants like old bicycles, stressing that unlike a bike, nuclear facilities could not be patched up and reused for an unlimited amount of time.
This is while a 2002 Atomic Energy Act, currently in force, outlines a total phase-out by the next twelve years and bans the extension of the residual life of reactors, which have already produced an amount of electricity equivalent to 32 years of operation.
Nuclear power production is highly unpopular in Germany, where leaks at nuclear waste dumps and accidents at aging power plants have led to several controversies in the past years.
Many experts believe the aging nuclear power plants can not endure 60 years of operation, stressing that such a decision would be extremely dangerous.
Nuke pushers to Vermont: ‘Drop dead’
By Harvey Wasserman | Online Journal | March 18, 2010
The nuclear power industry is sending a clear and forceful message to the citizens of Vermont: “Drop dead.”
The greeting applies to Ohio, New York, California and a nation under assault from a “renaissance” so far hyped with more than $640 million in corporate cash.
The Vermont attack includes:
1) A direct threat to ignore the state Senate’s 26-4 February vote against renewing the Yankee reactor’s operating license. As a condition of buying Yankee, Entergy long-ago ceded to the legislature approval of any extension of an operating license, which expires in 2012. But Entergy now says it will spend all the corporate cash it needs to evict the current Senate and install one more to its liking.
2) Vermont’s pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas says the Senate’s vote is “meaningless.” Douglas is not running for re-election but is certain to become a high-priced Yankee arm-twister when he leaves office.
3) Entergy has also implied that if it fails to buy itself a pro-nuke legislature in 2010, it will sue over any denial of the license extension.
4) Entergy is trying to shift ownership of Yankee into a shell corporation called Enexus which would allow it to avoid financial exposure. The scheme has been attacked by regulators and analysts in New York (Entergy also owns Indian Point) and elsewhere. “With its leaks and lies,” says Yankee activist Deb Katz, VY “is a liability for Entergy and a black eye” which some observers think the industry may want to jettison.
5) Entergy’s decommissioning fund has been radically drained by stock market losses and mismanagement. It retains nowhere near enough money for safe dismantlement, so Entergy says Yankee must operate for decades more to recoup the losses.
6) Under oath and in public, Entergy officials have denied the existence of underground piping at Vermont Yankee which does exist and is leaking radioactive tritium as well as other deadly isotopes.
7) A probe (nicknamed “Rover”) sent into the piping system to locate the leak has become stuck in radioactive muck.
8) State regulators and others warn that Yankee’s radioactive offal may already be pouring into the Connecticut River.
As angry citizens in Vermont and downwind New Hampshire and Massachusetts are told their worries have no place in a reactor renaissance, the message to “drop dead” has spread.
In Ohio, the infamous Davis-Besse reactor has turned up — again — with potentially catastrophic defects. In 2002 Davis-Besse came within a fraction of an inch of a catastrophic meltdown when boric acid ate nearly all the way through the reactor pressure vessel. Now assemblies that guide rods into the reactor core are again cracking. Davis-Besse’s owner, First Energy, is ignoring demands from terrified downwinders that the nuke be permanently shut.
In New York, Entergy’s Indian Point is leaking inside and out. Entergy continues to resist public demands for shut-down or a definitive clean up.
In California, Pacific Gas & Electric is pushing hard to extend the operating license for its Diablo Canyon reactor, ignoring public demands for a three-year project to map earthquake faults that run within three miles of the plant.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
German nuclear waste dump plans sparks row
Press TV – March 15, 2010
Germany’s environment ministry has come under fire for green-lighting further exploration of a disused salt mine in northern Germany as a potential final storage site for nuclear waste.
Germany’s Green party and environmental leaders are protesting the decision, which comes after a 10-year moratorium in the exploration plans for the controversial Gorleben nuclear waste dump.
Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen confirmed on Monday that talks on turning the Gorleben salt mine into a permanent nuclear waste dump are set to resume.
Roettgen added that he did not expect the storage facility to reopen before 2030, even if Gorleben analysis and tests are positive.
Gorleben has been used as temporary repository for nuclear waste since 1983, and led to a huge controversy after revelations that the German government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl had suppressed scientific evidence showing the site was not suitable for the job.
While extremely unpopular with the public, Germany relies on nuclear power to cover a quarter of its energy consumption.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new ruling coalition is planning to extend the lives of the country’s 17 nuclear plants, arguing that nuclear power could not be replaced until cost-efficient renewable power is more widely used.
This is while a previous center-left government in 2002 approved a decision to shut down the country’s aging reactors by the mid-2020s.
Israel ‘to unveil plans to build nuclear power plant’
BBC | March 8, 2010
Israel is expected to unveil plans this week to build a nuclear power plant, reports say.
They say an announcement will be made by Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau at an energy forum in Paris.
Israel is facing a crisis over electricity supplies, but environmental objections have blocked efforts to build a new coal-fired plant.
Israel has two nuclear reactors, including the Dimona facility which is said to have produced nuclear weapons.
The secret reactor is located in the south of the country. Israel neither confirms nor denies having nuclear weapons under its policy of “ambiguity”.
The other facility is a research reactor near Tel Aviv, which is open to international inspections.
Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which is designed to curb the spread of nuclear technologies with bomb-making potential.
‘Joint project’
Mr Landau is expected to tell the conference in Paris that Israel is considering building a nuclear power plant, reports say.
He has reportedly discussed the possibility of co-operating in the project with French Energy Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, together with neighbouring Jordan.
France is one of the world leaders in electricity production from nuclear power.
118 UN members reaffirm support for Iran’s N-program
Press TV – March 3, 2010
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) logo
As the West pushes for new sanctions against Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) moves to issue a new statement, voicing its support for Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.
Egypt’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) read the newly-issued NAM statement in a Wednesday meeting of nuclear watchdog’s board of governors.
“NAM confirms the basic and inalienable right of all states to the development, research, production and use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, without any discrimination and in conformity with their respective legal obligations,” the statement said.
“Therefore, nothing should be interpreted in a way as inhibiting or restricting the right of states to develop atomic energy for peaceful purposes,” it added.
“States’ choices and decisions including those of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear technology and its fuel cycle policies must be respected,” the 118-member movement said in its statement.
“NAM reaffirms the inviolability of peaceful nuclear activities and that any attack or threat of attack against peaceful nuclear activities, operational or under construction, poses a serious threat to human beings and the purposes of the Charter of the United Nation and of the regulations of the IAEA,” it said.
The statement comes as the West is weighing new sanctions on Iran in an effort to force the country into meeting its demands over its nuclear program.
Meanwhile, China — a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council — has shrugged off Washington’s call for harsher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities, arguing that diplomatic efforts have not yet been exhausted.
Tehran has repeatedly declared that sanctions will not force it to give up the Iranian nation’s legitimate right to access nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham plotting to revive “climate” bill
Gas Tax Proposal to Provide More Funding for Nuclear Plants
FILE: Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., left, talks as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., listens during a press conference at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem, Monday Nov. 16, 2009. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)
Susan Ferrechio,Chief Congressional Correspondent | Washington Examiner | March 2, 2010
A group of senators are trying to resuscitate global warming legislation, but the potential inclusion of a new gas tax threatens to keep action on one of President Obama’s signature initiatives stalled.
Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., have pushed aside the politically unpopular idea of passing a “cap and trade” system for regulating most emissions and would instead go after power plants, motor vehicles and manufacturers with targeted taxes and caps.
The lawmakers are hoping to get a bill together in the “coming weeks,” according to a Kerry aide, and then find a way to fit it in the already jammed Senate calendar, where the jobs agenda and now health care reform are the priorities.
“Unlike past pieces of legislation, we are taking a careful look at different sectors of the economy to determine the most appropriate policy to reduce emissions in each sector,” Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith said. “Based on input from all stakeholders, the idea is to take a reasonable, responsive approach to each sector to accomplish an economywide goal.”
Even without creating a cap and trade system, such a proposal would face opposition among Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, particularly those who will not support any bill that threatens to raise prices or impose a fuel tax, which could happen under this proposal.
“No bill that collides with the urgent imperative of job creation has a chance right now and to the extent that a climate bill has that feature or is seen as having that feature, it can’t go anywhere,” said William Galston, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Senate proponents of the bill are up against a daunting deadline, with a little more than six months left to tackle legislative business before the chamber adjourns for 2010 campaigning. Few, if any, endangered Democrats will be willing to vote on a bill that could be unpopular among economically struggling constituents.
“I think they are all in denial,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a global warming skeptic, told The Examiner on Monday. “They are going to be trying to impose a huge tax on Americans without any positive results. And we’re going to be there to remind everybody.”
Proponents of the plan believe it can succeed by using the piecemeal approach, which will make it easier to craft a bill that could attract the 60 votes needed for passage. And with Graham already on board, Democrats would only have to round up all 59 Democratic-controlled votes. The proposal would increase domestic oil and gas drilling and would provide federal funding for nuclear energy plants, which could attract moderate votes.
“I don’t think the climate and energy issue is dead in the Senate,” Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told The Examiner. “The real question is what kind of bill can you put together that can pass.”
sferrechio@washingtonexaminer.com
Further nuclear power subsidies are wrongheaded
By Mark Cooper | 2 December 2009
It is ironic that as the nation continues to suffer from the misallocation of risk by companies in the financial sector, some of the strongest supporters of free markets and critics of government action are urging a massive federal subsidy for nuclear power.
Most recently, the nuclear industry and its supporters want any climate bill that comes out of Congress to include more subsidies for the nuclear industry. Both the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act and the Senate energy bill, the American Clean Energy Leadership Act PDF, would potentially allow for billions of dollars to be handed out for the development of new nuclear plants in the United States. The Senate bill would literally give the nuclear industry a limitless blank check. This is in addition to $18.5 billion in loan guarantees and a production tax credit of 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour that the federal government already has allocated for nuclear energy in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. PDF All the while, the projected cost of nuclear reactor construction has escalated dramatically (almost tripling in less than a decade), demand for electricity has declined, and the cost of natural gas has plummeted.
Considering these challenges, private capital markets, not surprisingly, have refused to extend loans to the nuclear industry. In fact, they have lowered the financial ratings of utilities that are pursuing nuclear projects, which is why the industry is seeking further government support. In particular, the industry would like new rules that allow it to gobble up funds earmarked for clean energy technologies; elimination of conditions that protect taxpayers in the event of loan defaults; dramatic increases in tax and insurance subsidies; and accelerated and assured recovery of construction costs from ratepayers authorized by state regulators.
These direct subsidies would total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet believe it or not, the stakes for consumers would be still higher. Nuclear subsidies would induce utilities to choose high capital-cost nuclear reactors that expand their rate base and forego much lower-cost alternatives, such as greater energy efficiency and renewable energy, imposing excessive costs on consumers that eventually could run into the trillions of dollars. In an attempt to circumvent the sound judgment of capital markets, nuclear advocates erroneously claim that subsidies lower the financing costs for nuclear reactors and are good for consumers. (For a more lengthy analysis of these risks see my full report. PDF)
However, shifting risk does not eliminate it, and subsidies induce utilities and regulators to take greater risks that will cost taxpayers and ratepayers dearly. These risks include:
- When utilities skip over the lower-cost option, such as greater efficiency, wind power, and/or natural gas, costs rise, dramatically in the case of nuclear reactors.
- Subsidies encourage risky behaviors that would leave taxpayers and ratepayers to pay associated costs when and if those unwise projects go bad and are abandoned.
- Pre-approval for loan guarantees and/or construction work in progress reduces scrutiny over cost escalation and overruns.
- Large, high-risk projects, such as nuclear plants, can have adverse impacts on utility financial ratings, which result in high interest charges on utility debt and substantial increases in rates.
The recent efforts by the nuclear industry call to mind the previous U.S. nuclear construction boom that resulted in what Forbes called the “largest managerial failure in business history” in the mid-1980s. In that boom, one-half of all orders for nuclear plants were cancelled, reactors that were completed cost double their original estimates, four-fifths of utilities suffered large financial downgrades, and several firms went bankrupt.
Policy makers should refuse to hand out billions of dollars more to the nuclear power industry for widespread deployment of a costly technology and limit any such subsidies, if they are deemed necessary, for specific and narrow tasks of research, development, and demonstration. To prevent history from repeating itself they should subject any projects that are funded by subsidies to rigorous fiscal, technological, and administrative oversight and make sure that projects are structured with maximum taxpayer protections and transparency built into the conditions of the loan guarantees.
Furthermore, states should reject guarantees (and accelerated recovery) for nuclear construction costs, demand binding fixed-cost contracts before construction begins, and impose strong incentive and penalty mechanisms to control cost overruns.
The financial difficulties facing nuclear power projects are not a market failure, but are a market success–the capital markets correctly understand the grim economic realities of nuclear power. If policy makers override the judgment of the free market and force taxpayers and ratepayers to subsidize new reactors, consumers and the economy will pay a heavy price.
Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009
Radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production sites are being dumped into regular landfills, and are available for recycling and resale. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has tracked the Department of Energy’s (DOE) release of radioactive scrap, concrete, equipment, asphalt, chemicals, soil, and more, to unaware and unprepared recipients such as landfills, commercial businesses, and recreation areas. Under the current system, the DOE releases contaminated materials directly, sells them at auctions or through exchanges, or sends the materials to processors who can release them from radioactive controls. The recycling of these materials—for reuse in the production of everyday household and personal items such as zippers, toys, furniture, and automobiles, or to build roads, schools, and playgrounds—is increasingly common.
The NIRS report, “Out of Control on Purpose: DOE’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste into Landfills and Consumer Products,” tracks the laws, methods, and justifications used by the DOE to expedite the mandatory cleanup of the environmental legacy being created by the nation’s nuclear weapons program and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. One of the largest and most technically complex environmental cleanup programs in the world, the effort includes cleanup of 114 sites across the country to be completed by the end of 2008.
The DOE has unilaterally chosen allowable radioactive contamination and public exposure levels to facilitate “clean-up” of these sites. Pressure is increasing to allow clearing radioactivity from control in order to legalize the dispensing and disbursing of nuclear waste.
In 2000, the Secretary of Energy banned the commercial recycling of potentially radioactive metal. However, the ban does not apply to the disposal, reuse, or recycling of metal equipment, components, and pipes, or of other materials.
Seven sites of importance were investigated for the NIRS report: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Mound and Fernald, Ohio; West Valley, New York; and Paducah, Kentucky. Of these, Tennessee is said to be the main funnel that pours nuclear weapon and power waste from around the country into landfills and recycling facilities without public knowledge. “People around regular trash landfills will be shocked to learn that radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons production is ending up there, either directly released by DOE or via brokers and processors,” says author Diane D’Arrigo, NIRS’s Radioactive Waste Project director.
EnergySolutions, the company that operates the only private low-level radioactive waste disposal business in the US, disposes of more than 90 percent of the low-level radioactive waste generated in the US. It operates waste processing and disposition facilities in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Utah. The company also operates low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities, vaults, and landfills on the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.
Amazingly, as the DOE struggles through desperate and irresponsible measures to “disappear” this nation’s nuclear waste by the end of 2008, EnergySolutions has applied for a license in Tennessee to process nuclear waste from Italy.
This application marks the first time in the history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a company has asked to dispose of large amounts of foreign-generated low-level radioactive waste in the United States.
In February 2008, Bart Gordon, the Tennessee Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, asked the Northwest Interstate Compact of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management to withhold licensing that he says would put the US on a path to becoming “the world’s nuclear garbage waste dump.”
In an understatement, Gordon argued, “The US already faces capacity issues and other challenges in treating and disposing of radioactive waste produced domestically. We should be working on solving this problem at home before taking dangerous waste from around the world.”
UPDATE BY DIANE D’ARRIGO
The nuclear power and weapons industry and the government agencies that promote, oversee, and regulate nuclear activities are trying to save money by allowing large amounts of man-made, radioactively contaminated materials and property to be redefined as not radioactive. They don’t want to pay to try to isolate nuclear waste, including metal, concrete, asphalt, plastic, soil, equipment, and buildings, so they have developed ways to send the waste to regular landfills or even into commercial recycling that could end up in daily-use items the public makes contact with regularly.
This story is increasingly important as old nuclear weapons sites and power reactors close and the companies seek relief from responsibility and liability for the long-lasting nuclear waste they generated. It is especially dangerous as new nuclear power and weapons facilities are proposed, which will dramatically increase the amount of waste generated that could get into the public realm.
Although the US federal agencies have not generally allowed nuclear waste to be released from controls, they are still working on it. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have proposed rules in the wings, likely to emerge at any time. NRC is encouraging case by case releases of nuclear waste. The DOE has procedures to allow some radioactive waste out of controls but claims to be preventing radioactive metal from getting into the commercial metal market. A programmatic environmental review could overturn that prohibition, and internally DOE has many loopholes to let nuclear wastes out.
The story wasn’t covered much in the mainstream news. One notable exception was the investigative team led by Demetria Kalodimos on Channel 4 WSMV, Nashville’s NBC affiliate, who reported on the story and did over twenty follow-ups in the Nashville area (see http://www.nirs.org for links). Public awareness led to legislative attention and a commitment by the landfill operator who was taking nuclear waste to stop taking it. Kalodimos received three journalism awards for reporting and following up on the story herself.
The community is not satisfied with this voluntary commitment, because the Tennessee State Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) still allows nuclear waste to be released from controls. TDEC licenses companies to import nuclear waste from around the country and world for “processing,” including incineration and metal melting and reuse.
The report identified TDEC and Tennessee as leaders in releasing nuclear waste out of control.
The situation has worsened since last year. One of the processors is proposing to import a huge portion of Italy’s nuclear power waste to burn, process, melt and dump in the US (Tennessee and Utah).
Action against this can be taken by contacting your state governors to oppose it and by supporting federal legislation that would prohibit the US from importing foreign nuclear waste.
Citizens can also contact their state officials to find out if their state is allowing nuclear waste into the solid waste streams in their communities.
###
Sources:
Nuclear Information and Resource Service, May 14, 2007
Title: “Nuclear Waste in Landfills”
Author: Diane D’Arrigo
Environment News Service, May 14, 2007
Title: “US Allows Radioactive Materials in Ordinary Landfills”
Author: Sunny Lewis
Environment News Service, February 4, 2008
Title: “US Company Seeks Permit to Import Nuclear Waste”
Author: Sunny Lewis
Student Researchers: Derek Harms and Cedric Therene
Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, PhD
dianed@nirs.org for more information.
Another Corporate Bailout: Obama Goes Nuclear
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Radio | February 24, 2010
Opponents of nuclear power have now joined the ranks of those who are bitterly disappointed with President Obama, who is proposing to triple loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry. Barack Obama has long been allied with nuclear power, as have his two closest confidants, political advisor David Axelrod and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago-based Exelon corporation, the biggest nuclear power operator in the United States, was a major Obama campaign contributor. Obama’s support for nuclear power has never been a secret. If environmentalist Obamites were surprised by their president’s all-out push for nukes, they have only their own self-delusions to blame.
Back during the campaign, when Obama was getting huge checks from Big Nukes and Big Coal, environmentalists were giving him a political blank check for no other reason than Obama wasn’t George Bush. But it turns out that regarding nuclear power, Obama is worse than George Bush – three times worse. By boosting federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors from $18.5 to $54 billion, Obama is attempting to bring back to life an industry that has been all but dead for almost three decades. More than just a bailout, Obama is determined to pull off a nuclear resurrection.
The demise of U.S. nuclear power is generally dated to the partial meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant in March, 1979. But nuclear power has always been a failed business model in the U.S. Construction costs consistently run amok, at three, four and five times advertised. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that loans for nuclear plant construction have a more than fifty percent chance of never being repaid. Environmental opposition to nuclear power is not the reason the industry has been moribund for 30 years. Nuclear power was all but dead because private capital saw the industry as a bad risk. So Wall Street helped elect a president who would put up the people’s money. With public dollars reviving the industry, Chicago-based Exelon’s stock should shoot through the roof. Wall Street can prepare to process billions of dollars in new loans, knowing it doesn’t stand to lose one cent because the public is taking all the financial risk.
The public is also taking all the risk for the health hazards of nuclear power. Private industry will not insure against accidents, which could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. The public will ultimately pay for any cleanup.
Late-stage finance capitalism, like nuclear power, can only exist as a parasite on the larger society. The people pay all the costs: financial, safety, and health. The investment class puts up no money unless guaranteed a payback plus big profits. This isn’t about the environment. It’s about Wall Street stealing the people blind, through their bought-and-paid-for servants in the Congress and the White House. It’s really a crime story.
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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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- Inside the Israeli army’s propaganda wing
- Hundreds of Gaza Amputees Stranded in Legal Limbo
- The gallows law: Israel moves toward executing Palestinian children
- Tucker Carlson: The Path to Peace requires ending ‘special alliance’ with Israel
- This is ceasefire? Israel’s biggest massacre yet in Lebanon, another journalist killed in Gaza – Daily Update
- Tucker Carlson on Israel: This Is the Behavior of an Ally? Really?
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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