An infrared photo of a high-level radioactive waste rail shipment. The high temperature of such shipments, however, is the least of our worries. A severe accident, or attack, involving such a shipment could breach the container, leading to disastrous releases of hazardous radioactivity

In essence, if enacted, the proposal would launch shipments of high-level radioactive waste onto the roads, rails, and waterways in unprecedented numbers, bound for "consolidated interim storage sites," from which they would have to be removed someday, to permanent dumpsites. Unless, that is, they never are transferred -- which would lead to de facto permanent surface storage, parking lot dumps for high-level radioactive waste.

Last year, on April 26, 2012 -- the actual 26th anniversary of Chernobyl, to the day -- Sens. Feinstein and Alexander led the passage of a Mobile Chernobyl bill through not only their Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, but through the full Senate Appropriations Committee. Their bill, however, was never considered by the full Senate last year.

Now, Sens. Feinstein and Alexander have -- simultaneously to the "Discussion Draft" rollout -- proposed alternative legislative language. It would further expedite the shipment of high-level radioactive waste on our roads, rails, and waterways to "consolidated interim storage sites." Their alternative proposal, and its summary, are also available.

As this is a "Discussion Draft" of the proposed bill, the Senators state in their press release:

"The members are seeking comment on the discussion draft and a number of policy and technical questions from experts and stakeholders, including utilities, conservation groups, Blue Ribbon Commission members and others, by May 24."

Perhaps the single most important question involves "linkage" -- or lack thereof -- between "consolidated interim storage sites" and permanent dumpsites. As stated in the Senators' list of "Nuclear Waste Questions":

"Linkage between storage and repository

Should the bill establish a linkage between progress on development of a repository and progress on development of a storage facility?  If so, is the linkage proposed in section 306 of the bill appropriate, too strong, or too loose?  If a linkage is needed, should it be determined as part of the negotiations between the state and federal governments and included in the consent agreement rather than in the bill?"

Currently, as stated in the one page summary section entitled "Linkage Between Storage Facilities and a Repository," there is no linkage:

"The bill authorizes the Administrator [of a newly established Nuclear Waste Administration, outside of the Department of Energy, DOE] to begin siting consolidated storage facilities immediately, and does not set waste volumes [sic] restrictions on storage."

In this regard, the currently proposed legislation is significantly worse than the bill proposed last September by U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the now-retired former chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Although Bingaman unaccetably "gave away" the first 10,000 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel for "centralized interim storage" as a political compromise (a "pilot" parking lot dump, strongly advocated by Sen. Feinstein, with no strings attached to permanent disposal), his bill would have required linkage between permanent disposal and any further "centralized interim storage." He did this in order to guard against "interim" storage sites -- including one threatened in his own state of New Mexico, at WIPP -- from becoming de facto permanent surface storage, if a geologic repository is never pursued, developed, and operated.

The most likely targets for "consolidated interim storage sites" are at DOE facilities, including the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, the Idaho National Lab, and as previously mentioned, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. In fact, SRS hopes to reprocess the irradiated nuclear fuel moved there for "consolidated interim storage." This would be not only a serious nuclear weapons proliferation risk, but also a risk of widespread radioactive contamination of the environment downwind and downstream. It would also cost taxpayers and/or ratepayers many tens of billions of dollars.

Other likely targets for "consolidated interim storage sites" are Native American reservations, as well as nuclear power plants themselves. Over the course of decades, scores of Native American reservations have been targeted for high-level radioactive waste parking lot dumps, a shameful history of environmental racism. And, as but one of numerous such examples, Illinois' three-reactor Dresden nuclear power plant, and immediately adjacent General Electric-Morris reprocessing facility, already "host" around 3,000 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel on a single site. There is a high risk that this bill, if enacted, would increase the pressure to import and "consolidate" yet more waste there, as documented in an Oak Ridge study.

Rushing into high-level radioactive waste shipments on the roads, rails, and waterways makes no sense. Risks of Mobile Chernobyls, Dirty Bombs on Wheels, and Floating Fukushimas include severe accidents (high-speed crashes; high-temperature, long-duration fires; underwater submersions; etc.) or even intentional attacks. Such shipments to parking lot dumps would merely launch a radioactive waste shell game, as the wastes would have to be moved again someday, this time to permanent disposal sites. Thus, high-level radioactive waste transport risks would be multiplied, for no good reason.

Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) makes a lot more sense than this bad bill. HOSS calls for emptying vulnerable high-level radioactive waste storage pools into on-site dry cask storage, but would require significant upgrades to the safety, security, and environmental protections associated with dry cask storage: safeguards against accidents and natural disasters; concealment, distancing between casks, and fortification against attacks; and quality assurance on cask design and fabrication to ensure they will last not decades, but centuries, without leaking radioactivity into the environment. Nearly 200 environmental groups, representing all 50 states, have endorsed HOSS. They've been calling for it for well over a decade now.

Contact not only Sen. Wyden, but also your own two U.S. Senators, and urge that a strong linkage between "consolidated interim storage" and permanent disposal be re-established in this proposed legislation! Warn them that the risk of de facto permanent parking lot dumps for high-level radioactive waste is unacceptable! Let them know that rushing into Mobile Chernobyl shipments, and playing a radioactive waste shell game on the roads, rails, and waterways, makes no sense and takes unnecessary risks. Urge that Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS) be required instead, as a common sense interim alternative to this bill's bad ideas.

Contact Sen. Wyden at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee he chairs {per their instructions immediately below, as posted on their website}:

{Directions for Submissions

Please submit comments electronically to: Nwaste_feedback@energy.senate.gov 

Submission due date: Friday, May 24, 2013 at 5:00pm (EST)

The documents attached below can be used as a template for submitting comments.  We request that you submit your comments in the template format, but will accept comments in other formats.  Please feel free to respond to as many or as few of the questions as you like.

Please provide your name and affiliation in the header of your comments.

The committee may post the comments, including any personal identifying information you provide (street or e-mail addresses, or phone numbers) it receives on its website.  If you would like your personal identifying information withheld, please indicate that.

The comment period will close on Friday, May 24, 2013.

Please find the submission documents below [linked here] and the link to the discussion draft, summaries and questions here.}

You can contact your own two U.S. Senators at their websites, or via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Urge your Senators to oppose de-linking "consolidated interim storage" and permanent disposal. Urge them to block a rush into Mobile Chernobyl risks merely to play a radioactive waste shell game on the roads, rails, and waterways. Urge them to weigh in with Chairman Wyden and other members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee.

Nuclear waste storage casks for irradiated reactor fuel assemblies from two Pennsylvania nuclear power plants are showing signs of “premature degradation” after just a few years of storage of the timeless hazard. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Information Notice 2013-07) is cautioning operators of all nuclear power plants with the on-site dry cask storage systems that these hazardous material storage canisters are showing signs of deterioration. from “environmental moisture.”  At the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant, water has caused the corrosion of an O-ring seal on the lid of one of the nuclear waste storage casks allowing some of the helium coolant to leak out.  Not good, particularly because this cask was only 10 years old when a low pressure alarm sounded and its supposed to be licensable for up to 100 years. Meanwhile, a nuke waste cask from Three Mile Island Unit 2, the unit that had the nuclear accident in 1979, what fuel didn’t melt was put into dry casks for storage and shipped out to Idaho National Energy Laboratory. Seasonal freezing and ice has caused cracks to form in the concrete outer structure of one of the casks potentially shortening its projected 50 year service life.

Given that the nuclear waste is going to be extremely hazardous for millions of years, the "quality" of these casks suggests that this system is going to fail much sooner than currently credited.

An infrared photo of solid irradiated nuclear fuel being shipped by rail. Liquid high-level radioactive waste could have a similar thermal -- as well as radiological -- "signature," if heat-generating radioactive isotopes are retained in the solution.

Background links on the shipment of LIQUID high-level radioactive waste, containing HEU, from Chalk River, Ontario to SRS, USA (ongoing updates, check back for new entries as time goes on)

Environmental coalition attorney Terry Lodge

The coalition's reply re-asserted "no confidence" in DTE's ability to safely stored Class B and C "low-level" radioactive wastes on-site at Fermi 3 into the indefinite future, due to the lack of sure access to a disposal facility. it also again emphasized the lack of documented need for the 1,550 Megawatts of electricity Fermi 3 would generate. And the coalition alleged that NRC has failed to fulfill its federal responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), as by the illegal "segmentation" of the needed transmission line corridor from the rest of the Fermi 3 reactor construction and operation proposal.

This legal filing follows by a week upon the submission of public comments about NRC's Fermi 3 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). The comments, commissioned by Don't Waste Michigan and prepared by Jessie Pauline Collins, were endorsed by a broad coalition of individuals and environmental groups, including Beyond Nuclear. The FEIS comments included satellite images of harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie in 2012, and in 2011 to 2012, attributable in significant part to thermal electric power plants such as Detroit Edison's Monroe (coal burning) Power Plant, at 3,300 Megawatts-electric the second largest coal burner in the U.S. Fermi 3's thermal discharge into Lake Erie will worsen this already very serious ecological problem.

In the very near future, the environmental coalition intervening against the Fermi 3 combined Construction and Operating License Application (COLA) will submit additional filings on its contentions challenging the lack of adequate quality assurance (QA) on the project, as well as its defense of the threatened Eastern Fox Snake and its critical wetlands habitat. The State of Michigan has stated that Fermi 3's construction would represent the largest impact on Great Lakes coastal wetlands in the history of state wetlands preservation law. 

Hanford tanks under construction

However, the nuclear power industry, and its friends in government, are now pushing "centralized interim storage" -- moving commercial irradiated nuclear fuel to "parking lot dumps" at places like Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, NM; Savannah River Site, SC; Native American reservations; or nuclear power plants, like Dresden in IL.

Once again, permanently closed nuclear power plants, including Big Rock Point in Michigan, are being used, in an attempt to justify an expedicted "pilot" centralized interim storage facility. This time, Obama's resigning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, and U.S. Senators such as Lamar Alexander (R-TN, Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, Chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK, Ranking Member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee), are leading the charge. They argue that permanently closed nuclear power plants need to be able to move their high-level radioactive wastes, in storage in dry casks, so these parcels of land can be released for "un-restricted re-use." This argument ignores the significant radioactive contamination of soil, groundwater, flora, fauna, and surface water sediments at these sites, despite decommissioning efforts costing hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars. Big Rock Point itself has lingering plutonium, and other radioactive, contamination, calling into very serious question the site's "un-restricted re-use" for residential development, a state park, or anything else.

These supposedly "interim" facilities could easily become de facto permanent surface storage sites, if a deep geologic repository is never opened. The now thankfully canceled Private Fuel Storage, Limited Liability Corporation (PFS LLC) parking lot dump targeted at the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians Reservation in Utah is a cautionary tale in this regard. If scores of rail-sized containers of Maine Yankee wastes had been moved to PFS, when the Yucca dump was canceled, they would have had to be "returned to sender" in Maine -- 4,000 miles of round trip risks through many states, which would have accomplished absolutely nothing.

Even if a deep geologic repository is opened someday, the centralized interim storage wastes would have to be moved, yet again, unnecessarily multiplying transport risks. If the repository is located back in the direction from which the wastes came in the first place, this would also represent needless round trip transport risks. In a recent letter to the editor to the Washington Post, Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps warned about the risks of playing a radioactive waste shell game like this on our nation's roads, rails, and waterways.

There is the political danger, as Spence Abraham did in the aftermath of 9/11, that the recently announced high-level radioactive waste leaks from six Hanford Nuclear Reservation underground storage tanks in Washington State -- posing a severe risk to the nearby Columbia River -- could be twisted, in an attempt to create public panic, in order to rush the enactment of centralized interim storage legislation.

However, as Beyond Nuclear has warned in an action alert, Hanford's leaking wastes must be stabilized on-site as a top priority. As Washington State Governor Jay Inslee has called for, leaking tanks must transer their wastes into brand new, state of the art storage tanks, as soon as possible. And the liquid and sludge high-level radioactive wastes must be solidified (vitrified) into glass logs, to maximize the wastes' stability over the longer term. Vitrified glass logs, encased in steel canisters, would be the form in which the high-level radioactive wastes would be someday transported away from Hanford, to a deep geologic repository, where they would be permanently buried.

Just as Hanford's military high-level radioactive wastes must be stabilized first, before transport away, so too must commercial irradiated nuclear fuel, stored on-site at reactors, be safeguarded and secured, as soon as possible. For more than a decade, hundreds of environmental groups have called for Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). HOSS calls for the emptying of extremely vulnerable storage pools, and the design and fabrication of quality dry casks that are safeguarded against accidents, fortified against attacks, and built to last for centuries without leakage of high-level radioactive waste into the living environment.

Beyond Nuclear's Paul Gunter is currently on a speaking tour of the Pacific Northwest. He will visit the Columbia Generating Station (CGS) located immediately adjacent to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as part of Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" campaign. CGS is a General Electric Mark II Boiling Water Reactor, similar in design to the Mark Is which melted down, exploded, and have released catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan.

Paul will also speak as a panelist at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon this weekend. Hanford's recently revealed radioactive leaks will be a hot topic of conversation, for sure!

Please urge your U.S. Senators and Representative to block centralized interim storage legislation, which would launch unprecedented numbers of potential Mobile Chernobyls onto the roads, rails, and waterways. You can phone your Members of Congress via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121, or write them a letter, send them a fax, or email them by finding their contact information at their websites. The most effective way to influence your Members of Congress is to meet with them (or their staff) face to face. Consider coming to ANA's DC Days April 14-17, or arrange a meeting with your Members of Congress's district office nearest you!

As but the latest sign that Mobile Chernobyl's engines are revving on Capitol Hill, U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) told reporters yesterday that centralized interim storage nuclear waste legislation will be drafted in the near future. Sen. Wyden toured Hanford on Feb. 19th in the aftermath of the leaks being revealed, and ordered a Government Accountability Office investigation of matters at Hanford. Sen. Wyden also donned a radiation protection suit in April 2012 and toured the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Upon his return to Capitol Hill, he called on the full resources of the U.S. government to be deployed to Japan to prevent an even greater catastrophe from unfolding at Fukushima Daiichi's Unit 4 high-level radioactive waste storage pool, at risk of a cooling water drain down and irradiated nuclear fuel fire.

You can sign the petition here.

Maureen has pointed out that her petition has hit a nerve at Forbes, where a columnist felt the need to pooh pooh concerns about radioactive metal "recycling" (radioactive poisoning of the metal recycling stream) and dumping into ordinary municipal landfills, where it can then leak into groundwater and drinking water supplies. She urges folks to read the article, and post a comment at the Forbes site.

This most recent discovery was announced by the Department of Energy (DOE) on February 15, 2013 with a drop in the liquid level estimated at 150 to 300 gallons per year from the total 530,000 gallons stored in a  tank identified as T-111.

Since 1989, the DOE has spent $16 billion on several schemes to manage Hanford’s nuclear waste all abandoned due to lack of credibility, cost escalations and unacceptable contractor performance. The DOE’s current plan is to finish construction of a $13.5 billion “Waste Treatment Plant” (WTP) to separate the dangerous waste stream into high-level and “low-activity” nuclear waste.  The high-level waste is to be immobilized in a glass-forming material that is then sealed in stainless steel canisters to cool and harden for eventual deep geological burial. The “low-activity” nuclear waste would be “vitrified” (immobilized in glass material) and dumped on-site.  However, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) recently warned in a December 2012 report that this massive clean-up project is already delayed beyond 2019 with out-of-control construction costs. If ever completed, the GAO identifies that the colossal operation itself will be faced with “significant safety and operation problems” due to the generation and build-up of explosive hydrogen gas in a pipeline system nearly one million linear feet long.

Facing facts, there is no “safe storage” of nuclear waste. Likewise, there is no permanent radioactive “clean-up” only “trans-contamination” of the environment.  The most responsible long-term management plan for nuclear waste is to stop generating it.  The utter and total irresponsibility of the nuclear industry is coming clearer to light with looming federal cuts to address threats from the endless legacy of the Atomic Age.  It is now paramount that the Columbia River and the American Northwest be protected from our own Cold War nuclear attack.  

Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps warned, in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post, about these irradiated nuclear fuel transport risks. This came in response to a Post editorial in support of rushed centralized interim storage.

Kevin put out a media statement in mid-January, responding to Energy Secretary Chu's call on Capitol Hill for centralized interim storage legislation. Kevin focused on the risks of radioactive waste transportation, and the radioactive waste shell game that would result from rushing into centralized interim storage.

Take action! Contact your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative. Urge them to block this risky radioactive waste shell game. You can reach their offices via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard, (202) 224-3121.

Contact the White House. Urge President Obama to put the brakes on the Mobile Chernobyls, dirty bombs on wheels, and Floating Fukushimas.

What are the alternatives? Well, we need to stop the generation of irradiated nuclear fuel in the first place. Atomic reactors should be permanently shutdown, their electricity supply replaced with energy efficiency, as well as renewable sources such as wind and solar.

For the wastes which already exist, hardened on-site storage -- endorsed by 170 environmental groups, representing all 50 states -- is an interim measure, addressing the potentially catastrophic risks of current indoor wet pool and outdoor dry cask storage vulnerabilities to accident, attack, and leakage.