Media Coverage

Letters to the Editor

Monroe Evening News (Michigan)
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
 Page 4A
 
NRC lacks diligence on nuclear plants
Thanks for your prominent coverage of the important Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public meeting held Aug. 20 on the new atomic reactor proposed at DTE's Fermi Plant. As a board member of Don't Waste Michigan, I was there. I was dismayed about certain statements made by an NRC official.

NRC’s supposed to protect public health, safety and the environment. Yet when questioned by a local concerned citizen about the lack of a permanent disposal plan for deadly high-level radioactive waste, NRC’s Barry Zalcman brushed it aside, expressing "confidence" that a dump will be opened by 2025, and that on-site pool and outdoor dry cask storage would be safe for a hundred years after reactor shutdown.

Zalcman must have missed last year’s news, when his own boss, NRC Commissioner Ed McGaffigan, publicly stated his grave doubts that the Yucca Mountain, Nevada dump would ever open, let alone by 2025. Scientific misgivings about Yucca’s geologic suitability have grown so loud that, if elected, Barack Obama has pledged to end the project. Even John McCain, who had previously consistently supported the dump, now admits it may not be the best idea.

Zalcman’s on-site waste storage confidence is similarly misplaced. Sierra Club’s concern that the "Fermi 2 spent fuel pool on the third floor of the reactor building is an inviting target" is well founded, based on NRC’s own reports. As you reported, "The NRC still is in the process of evaluating nuclear plant susceptibility to an airborne terrorist attack." But a 2001 NRC study found that loss of cooling water from a storage pool could cause a radioactive waste inferno, killing 25,000 people downwind as far as 500 miles away. Fermi 2's waste storage pool remains vulnerable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, nearly seven long years after the 9/11 attacks. A century of such risks sounds scary.

Yucca will likely never open. Even if it does, wastes will remain at Fermi for many decades to come, until the dump is built and wastes trucked, trained or barged there. Zalcman may be right, wastes will still be at Fermi 100 years from now. But, unlike NRC’s "confidence," they will remain vulnerable to attack or accident and catastrophic radioactivity releases. They need to be secured and safeguarded the entire time, but they are not currently. Rep. John Dingell, chair of the House Energy Committee with NRC oversight, should hold hearings on NRC’s dereliction of duty.

Kevin Kamps
Beyond Nuclear
Takoma Park, MD