Underground Sunshine Productions

Nuclear Waste Issue Searing American Landscape

colin — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:23:29 +0000

A fascinating article on the current situation in the United States regarding their nuclear waste.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2012/07/11/nuclear-waste-issue-searing-american-landscape/

Nuclear waste possibly ranks as that industry’s top quagmire: Nuclear plant operators are supposed to store their spent fuel onsite until it is properly cooled and at which point, it is supposed to go into a permanent burial facility. The problem is that such an eternal resting spot has never come to pass.

The dilemma has gotten even more complex now that a federal appeals court ruled last month that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not properly do its job when it previously told those same nuclear operators that they could extend their onsite storage from 30 years to 60 years. With such a triumphant court decision in their hands, environmental and citizen groups pounced: They subsequently asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to stop issuing any nuclear construction or operating licenses until the NRC does its job.

“It’s hard to see how federal and state officials can justify putting more taxpayers or customer money at risk on new reactor projects until this situation is resolved,” says Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford,who has lent his support to the 22 groups, called CleanEnergy.org, who filed this petition before the court.

In February, the NRC granted Southern Company and its subsidiary Georgia Power the right to build two new units, which are expected to be operational by 2017. A second license went in March to Scana Corp., whose subsidiary Santee Cooper will build two more plants that are expected to be up and running by 2018.

With those approvals, the nuclear energy industry here had finally prevailed, especially in the aftermath of the Japanese nuclear accident in March 2011. But then came the appeal’s court decision this June, and the environmental petition a couple weeks later. The NRC responded to that recent petition, saying that neither that legal document nor the court ruling would have any immediate effect on waste-related issues because no other licensing requests are pending.

A little background: Four Northeastern states and some environmental groups sued the NRC after it had extended onsite storage rights from 30 to 60 years, arguing that any leaks from the spent fuel storage pools or dry cask storage could harm groundwater supplies and potential land use. The DC appeals court ruled, saying that the NRC failed to properly examine the environmental consequences of its actions. Now, the winning parties say that the NRC can’t issue any more licenses until it fulfills this legal demand.

“This court decision may just change the timeframe and the timing, and accelerate some of that work,” responds Gregory Jaczko, who just resigned at the NRC’s top commissioner and whose comments came in a speech before he left. “Ultimately, I believe this is an issue that the Commission will have little difficulty addressing.”

The nuclear industry says that it is studying the issue but acknowledges that the decision is a setback. It believes that the NRC did present a compelling case in 2010 when it granted the extension. But it says that it is now imperative that the commission fulfill its legal obligations under the Environmental Protection Act so that nuclear operators are not left in regulatory limbo.

Long run, though, the industry still maintains that a permanent storage facility is necessary. To that end, it is saying that U.S. officials have a legal obligation to create such a burial site whereas the opponents are saying that there are too many pitfalls associated with the Yucca Mountain location in Nevada that had been the intended permanent place. Ironically, the same D.C. appeals court could decide in a few months whether to force the NRC to re-open that licensing case.

The June waste ruling did say that the NRC does not need to provide a detailed analysis for each and every onsite storage site — only a general environmental impact statement or a finding of no significant environmental harm. Still, opposition groups are saying that they will push hard to require site-specific evaluations, which could add years to any licensing or re-licensing process.

“We are disappointed by the court’s decision,” says Ellen Ginsberg, general counsel for the Nuclear Energy Institute. “Nonetheless, we urge the commission to act expeditiously to undertake the additional environmental analysis identified by the court in the remand.”

The pending court petition is focusing attention on the nuclear sector. But such notice may work to inform the public and their elected representatives of what it is that the industry needs to continue to operate — one that has been providing 20 percent of the nation’s electric power. Indeed, nuclear operators have only acquiesced to extending onsite storage rights because they have been unable to find a permanent resting spot. Given nuclear energy’s potential and pollution-free attributes, it is more likely to expand, not wither. Therefore, a resolution to the waste dilemma must come quickly.

Great Article on Nuclear Waste From the Economist

colin — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 02:05:25 +0000

The Economist ran this great article on nuclear waste a few months back.

Leave well alone
The best thing to do with nuclear waste is to stash it away, not reprocess it
http://www.economist.com/node/21549102

OF ALL THE difficulties nuclear power is heir to, that of waste has most fired the public imagination. Building power plants that last a century is one thing; creating waste that will be dangerous for 100 times as long is another. For decades America has failed to create a long-term repository for the waste from its civilian reactors at its chosen site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Most other countries have similarly failed, so the waste from today’s reactors piles up.

As it happens, long-term waste disposal is among the more tractable nuclear problems. Temporary storage is a good start. Once fuel has cooled down in spent-fuel pools for a while, it can be moved to “dry cask” storage. Such storage appears robust (dry casks at Fukushima, hit by the tsunami, show no sign of having leaked) and can be maintained indefinitely. It takes space and needs to be guarded, but it can provide an adequate solution for a century or more.
That is if you do not want to reprocess the fuel to recover the plutonium inside it. If you are a nuclear engineer you may find reprocessing rather appealing, partly to show that your nuclear programme is as sophisticated as any and partly because it gets around the offensive inefficiency of light-water reactors. If all the uranium in reactor fuel was either split or turned into plutonium which itself was then split, you would get 170 times more energy than you get from just using the fuel once, and would have opened the way to technically intriguing breeder systems.

You will not, though, be attracted to reprocessing if you are an accountant. It costs a great deal, and the plutonium produced is for the most part more of a liability than an asset. If you are a plant operator you will also have your doubts. Burning fuel to which plutonium has been added has various drawbacks, one of which is that it is much hotter when it comes out of the reactor, straining the capacity of your spent-fuel pools. Nor will you be that eager if you are concerned about the local environment; reprocessing plants have a bad contamination record. And if you are sceptical about the merits of nuclear proliferation, you will want to keep reprocessing to a minimum.

Having avoided reprocessing, in the long term you will want to find a safe deep underground repository for the waste in your dry casks. This need not be too hard. Find a community that may be willing to take on the challenge (one that already has ties to the nuclear industry might be thus predisposed) and that has access to a suitable geological setting. Then have an open discussion of the issues, look at people’s concerns and offer ways to lessen them while recompensing the community for its trouble. Set up arrangements by which local people can reassure themselves about any threats to their health, perhaps with free medical treatment and tests. Don’t scrimp on investment in the community. Then let them choose. The chances are that they will say yes. This kind of approach seems to be working in Sweden and Finland, and Britain is trying something similar.
This is more or less the opposite of what was done at Yucca Mountain. What some now refer to as the Screw Nevada act of 1987 imposed the choice of site and schedule. Nevada politicians objected. Geological surveys threw up some problems. Nevada’s caucuses moved up the electoral calendar, meaning that presidential candidates were greatly helped by an anti-Yucca stance. Moreover, the state’s senior senator, Harry Reid, became Senate majority leader. President Obama drew a line under the episode by finally abandoning the project in 2010, 12 years after the facility was meant to have entered service.

But as well as providing a textbook example of how not to handle long-term storage, America also boasts a success. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the salt caverns of Carlsbad, New Mexico, started taking shipments of waste from the country’s military programme in 1999. Throughout the life of the project the local community has been consulted and, on occasion, recompensed. WIPP is not entirely trouble-free, but it has achieved enough social and political stability to make the best of its geological gifts.

POST SUSTAINABLE MODERNISM? by Andrew McKillop

colin — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 14:39:58 +0000

The phrase “sustainable development” was thrust into widespread use by the 1987 UN report of the Gro Harlem Brundtland commission, a group of “eminent persons” supposedly setting “a global agenda for change” in response to the alleged interaction of failing economic development, depleting natural resources and a deteriorating environment. Media treatment naturally went a lot further, rooting sustainable development in a soup of hysterical forecasts of environmental apocalypse, man-made global warming driving sea levels up so far they swamp most cities, mass species die-off and extinction, spiraling oil and other resource depletion, nuclear and industrial catastrophes, rampant overpopulation, mass starvation, epidemics and global poverty. Without explicitly saying it, the Brundtland report implied that unfettered capitalism was the basic driver.
Brundtland’s seemingly reasonable definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” is often taken as a critique of market systems and economics in general, but is never attacked for its totally false logic. Firstly, what passes for ‘development’ is not meeting the needs of the present, for example the need for jobs in the US, Europe and other regions, or the totally simple and basic need to feed the world’s present population, but more ‘philosophically’ how do we know, today, what future generations will need or want ? Going back 2 generations in time, to the late 1950s or early 1960s, who could have said at the time that Europe, for example, would need 215 million cars and 460 million cellphones two generations later ?
If that had been known, guessed or forecast 2 generations back in time, what could have been done at the time to either make it easier to happen, or harder to make it happen? Maybe “we” should have outlawed the transistor and tunnel diode ? Of course the real answer is that it didn’t matter. Technology changed. Attitudes and values changed, society changed and the economy changed.
The bottom line for sustainability boomers is always that we can forecast coming disasters, and fixing the forecast mess needs world government. Hence with no surprise the UN remains heavily committed to sustainable everything, promoting itself as the only way to get more political oversight and control, balancing out the triple bottom line of the economy, environment, and society. As Brundtland commissioner Maurice Strong, who orchestrated the 1992 Rio conference, declared in the run-up to the dead on arrival Rio + 20 conference: “We must devise a new approach to co-operative management of the entire system of issues.”
SUSTAINABLE NATIONS? Few national delegations at the forlorn Rio + 20 get together made anything but glancing references to why the loudly trumpeted draft planning and agenda document for the conference, “The Future We Want,” was a non starter. Penned and marked-up by a myriad of ultra-liberal NGOs, UN bureaucrats and business hopefuls this set of Nice Ideas is out of range and out of time for countries with vast
budget deficits, astronomic sovereign debts, huge trade deficits, rising unemployment and a loss of national identity. In a crisis riddled financial and economic situation, nobody is specially worried about what happens in 2 generations time. Managing the next 7 days or 20 days matters more than the next 20 years. This is the real “system of issues”: the future already arrived and it is bad. What do we do now?
More sophisticated arguments – like how do we know what “needs” will be in 50 years time ? – were absent for Brundtland’s talkshop back in 1987, possibly because the logical fallacies of the now copybook and idiot friendly Brundtland definition of ‘sustainability’ were never pointed out. They are certainly and logically even more absent today, because global elites have already admitted defeat (would you expect them to say it, outright?) in telling us what our needs will be next week and how we can’t meet them. As the European debt mess or panic shows every day, the 17-nation Eurozone could or might not need the euro currency as soon as the end of 2012, or might be magically morphed into an EU Federal Debt Union. Who knows? Now tell us what our needs will be in 2020 or 2035 !
This only underlines what daily reality teaches any sane person; not even knowing what we need in the present makes it really hard for our elites to manage the future. The claimed argument (by conspiracy theorists) that Europe’s elites are deliberately making things as bad as possible, to ram through their secret federal Europe plan, is about as funny as global warming theory in the European “summer” of 2012, to date. There is no plan ! Face up to reality.
The NGOs writing the fairy stories used for “The Future We Want” can demand curbs on “any technology that can imply a serious risk for the environment or human society, including in particular synthetic biology, geo-engineering, genetic modification, nuclear energy and nanotechnology”, but one Fukushima disaster has a real world, hard to talk around impact. A second disaster of the Fukushima type will almost certainly seal the fate of The Doomsday Machine, with no need for Rio be-ins. Exactly the same applies to all other Dr Strangelove specials, from nanotech to GM animal and plant “engineering”, whose economic siginificance – for decades ahead – is almost a guaranteed zero.
Only massive, clear and irrefutable disasters change human behavior – until then, there is always a geek “trying to make it work”. The May 1937 Hindenberg disaster, which killed a tiny fraction of the average daily death toll in Syria, was however enough to seal the fate of hydrogen filled and diesel fuelled Zeppelins as upmarket transatlantic transport providers. At the time, passenger planes were developing rapidly: the Hindenberg was already a curiosity – exactly like the Rio + 20 conference.
The failure of Rio + 20 is also the failure of so-called “ecology politics”: public interest in the conference started low, and went lower on a one-way track because its posturing and preening has no relation to the real concerns and real worries of the general public in any country, anywhere. Ecology politics reflects this: voters have lost interest, or are losing interest. Public opinion is already fully aware of the degraded environment, diminishing resource supplies, price-rationed basic foods and a future of almost certain declining wealth, or even poverty, which Miracle Liberalism (call it capitalism redux) can only deliver, and does deliver.
The greatest real and legitimate fear, as shown by a host of opinion poll results in all OECD countries and the Emerging economies is much more stark: the non survival of the nation and national identity. These (nations) are a highly threatened species, in no way protected by the Petri dish type multiplication of supposed New Nations, whose sustainability is close to zero. In the globalized real world of today there is only one nation: The No Nation.
POST RIO+20 MODERNISM How the No Nation is governed is obviously a tricky question: how does a non-nation or non-entity govern itself ? Can it govern itself? What will its life expectancy be ? This mysterious thing called “the global economy” is in fact very closely related to the magic thing called “the market”. Neither exist except by default, and only because society was out to lunch. There was always an alternative, before. There will be so, after.
Rio + 20 went down the WC pan of History as easily as an avocat and langoustine side dish goes down the throats of senior traders at a busy bee finance conference, with the same lashings of champagne to burp during the press conference afterglow, but its failure underlines how close we are to spontaneous mega change. Of course called “surprising”, because it was never the focus of lumbering decades-long UN talkshops nor featured in a myriad of media show events (like the fake crisis of global warming), it will happen all the same.
Arab Spring already happened, but how many UN meetings talked about the need for urgent and total political change in the Arab countries, in 2010, one year before it started? Arab Spring also quickly morphed into what it really is: civil war. During these, the talk-talk tends to get pushed aside, and people get around to doing what comes naturally: fighting.
The longstanding and creaky spectre of Peak Oil crisis, where oil consumers and consuming countries simply go on always consuming more, whatever the price, and the world runs out of oil just like that – has morphed as totally as the prospects for Hosni Mubarak’s next 10-year one party rulership life extension, surrounded by his Western democratic political chums and paymasters. It didnt happen. Oil demand flattened and then started declining, and may go on doing so for a host of reasons I look at in other articles. Mubarak got kicked out of power and sentenced to life imprisonment. Things change.
For the elite this is dangerous and uncontrolled change, another way of saying they didnt think of it, or want it, or want to talk about it. But it happened. In no way are the world’s environment problems going to steal away in the night – as likely as Bashr el Assad stealing away in the night – but they are going to change in accelerated fashion. When this type of change happens the past and future are totally unalike, which again helps explain why Rio + 20 was not only a farce but a failure. The conference addressed problems that had been talked down and out, but morphed into different formats and broke out as spontaneous and real change. This is the change that is coming, and a likely collateral demage victim will be the nation state – and 18th century invention that came alongside things like “the market”.

An Interesting Article on Nuclear Waste

colin — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:13:08 +0000

Martin Cohen, co-author of The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel suggested that we include this article that he wrote for infowars.com on our webpage. Please have a read and tell us what you think.

Breaking: Massive Nuclear Secret Uncovered In Austin, Texas

Infowars.com June 15, 2012

The history of ‘fly-tipping’ nuclear waste is one of the great non-secrets of the nuclear industry.
As Andrew McKillop and I recalled in our book on nuclear myths earlier this year, for all the talk about responsible and diligent efforts to find a ‘permanent repository’ for all the nuclear waste, the reality is of cynical and careless ad hoc measures. The Russians dump their waste in Siberia. the French dump it in the sea – or grind it up to make hard-core for roads. Many countries just pile it up outside their power stations. When Fukushima made that tactic impractical, the Japanese simply started pumping waste into the sea where their Nuclear Regulatory Agency says it will ‘soon disperse’.

But here’s what the scandalised papers said half a century ago about the French efforts to roll steel drums of waste into the Mediterranean .“Ten tightly sealed drums filled with radio active waste matter, caused a certain amount of panic, when the French Atomic Energy Commission, announced that they intended to be rid of the drums by dumping them into the Mediterranean sea”, reported the newspapers on December 10 1960. Panicked, or maybe just very cross, the Nice Municipal Council threatened an administrative strike;, the population of Corsica began to organise a mass demonstration;, and hotel owners all along the Riviera raised violent objections. Eventually, the Atomic Energy commission removed the drums and stored them in “an unrevealed place”, as the paper it was tactfully put it. Quite likely, they are still there, and still emitting their invisible death-rays, albeit now under supervision. Or they might be lying forgotten somewhere now, maybe at the bottom of the sea… who wants to know?

Instead, much better to reassure the public that instead of “a 1000km line of grimy railway wagons filled with coal” just “two smart truckloads of cheap and plentiful uranium” (from “stable countries like Canada of Australia”) will run a power station large enough to keep a major city going for a year! That’s the crucial comparison to be made, at least At least, according to Or so say nuclear energy’s supporters. And as to the relatively trivial volumes of leftover waste, there is a very promising plan.

Actually, in fact, there are lots of plans. Almost as many plans as there are drums of nuclear waste themselves… Almost as many plans as there is waste itself. But still nowhere any solutions. The unconscionable truth is that if nuclear plants are potential dirty bombs waiting to go off, nuclear waste is an actual time-bomb, and one ticking away now. Talk of ticking time-bombs sounds melodramatic, but consider what it nuclear waste is – a metal container containing material which generates heat, up to a hundred degrees centigrade typically, that can then cause hydrogen gas to burst the container, scattering its radioactive particles far and wide, in the best spirit of Pandora’s mythical box of evils. No wonder the costs of keeping this nuclear waste bottled up are so high — not that it is not the quasi-private nuclear companies who will pay. It is the general public, both today, and in on through many uncounted and uncountable future generations. It’s just as well for the industry that those uncountable people, well, don’t count.

Now, it is true that nuclear waste is quite small in volume compared to any other industry, particularly compared to coal. In fact, nuclear power experts love defending the Friendly Atom against Black King Coal, and finding that nuclear power is a much better choice because it produces so little waste compared pointing to the massive slag heaps and poisoned tips around coal-fired power plants. But iIf World Nuclear Association websites allow that an industry standard 1000 Megawatt reactor uses about 25 tonnes per year of enriched uranium, they neglect to mention are less clear that this has already created 25 000 tons of waste, upstream and downstream, that is to say, in the process of being mined, and refined.

What is more, coal waste can be transformed into parkland, even if it costs a lot of money, replete with birds and butterflies, even if it may cost a lot of money. Nuclear waste effectively cannot be rendered harmless, and so presents unique and complex problems for dispersal or storage. Reprocessing, despite its promising sounding name, actually increases the amount of radioactive waste, and as for the elusive goal of nuclear fusion, which could simply burn all the waste up, like a solar furnace, this remains merely a scientific dream. (Good money to be made researching it though!)

In reality, there are just three options:

• Concentrate and contain;
• Dilute and disperse;
• Delay and decay.

For the USA, being the country with the largest supply of nuclear electricity brings with it comes with the honour of having the largest amounts of nuclear waste needing treatment. And therefore, very logically, the USA also has the most pressing problems disposing of its troublesome, costly and dangerous nuclear wastes – problems of nuclear waste processing, treatment, transport, disposal and-or storage, problems concerning a cocktail of isotopes such as iodine-129 (deadly for 16 million years) and plutonium (eminently manageable, with a 24 thousand year half-life…)..

To get these radioactive, and also extremely chemically toxic wastes out of sight and out of mind, it is easiest to either secretively drop waste in the sea or bury it deep, deep into the earth. With the former option increasingly frowned upon, this fact has resulted in all of the nuclear-committed countries are looking for what are called “geological and deep mine final repositories”. Unfortunately, in all cases, the costs are bankruptingly high and the technological challenges are “daunting”, as the experience of the USA perfectly reveals.

The story of the Yucca Mountain project, near Las Vegas, encapsulates underlines the myriad problems for very long-term disposal and storage of nuclear wastes. Noticing that the project was likely never to be completed, simply because it had been stalled so long, sixteen US power companies filed a lawsuit in the Court of Appeals in April 2010, arguing that the government should stop charging them special fees on their nuclear electricity production to pay for it. At the time they were jointly paying (or to be more precise, via a levy on electricity of about one tenth of a US cent per kilowatt hour, American consumers were paying) about US$ 750 million a year into the Yucca fund. Nonetheless, oOver the 27 years since this levy started, the fund accrued this had built up to the apparently impressive amount of about US$ 24 billion, earning the Federal government about US $1 billion a year in interest. In this small way, nuclear energy has been a good investment for the government. The catch was that, meanwhile, the projected costs had soared to above $85 billion. This is the sad reality of nuclear waste dumping in all countries. Rather than getting closer to solutions, Far from the waste issue nearing solution, the story rather is governments turn around one day and say “the problem suddenly got so bad we couldn’t do anything about it. So sorry”.

A special committee of inquiry, known as the Blue Ribbon Commission, reported on the situation in 2011 and found that in fact, not only just the interest on the money but the principal as well ALL the money had been taken by the Federal authorities, and used for other budget priorities ‘exactly like ordinary taxes’, revealing that the waste problem had been even more lucrative for the government than previously apparent.

A similarly expensive high-cost story, this time in France, is concerns the tomorrow-never-comes Bure project. In Sweden, however, the a cost-trimming solution is has been to designate the underground final storage repository at Forsmark (the reactor site where routine radiation checks revealed the Chernobyl cloud to the world), a mere 50 metres under ground level, and say it is only intended for short-lived radioactive waste. In Finland, too, buries considerable ingenuity has resulted in high-level wastes too being buried under reactors, which also avoids having to pay to transport them.

Alas, despite decades of research and truly vast quantities of money spending – often dissimulated as “military secret’ spending – there is no economical way of separating high-level and low-level wastes, transporting themse to secure and safe storage, and preventing leakage, loss or theft of these wastes. In the past five years, the estimated costs of radioactive waste disposal have massively grown massively, in all the most nuclear-committed countries, to the point where they this must inevitably drive up the costs of electricity from all and any and all generating sources or systems.

Another all too typical story, this time from Germany. Back in September 2008, UPI reported that Germany was engulfed in a discussion over how to best handle nuclear waste, after it had surfaced in public that leaks threatened security at a radioactive waste dumping site in Lower Saxony. Over the past decades, some three thousand gallons of salty base had been flushing into the site each day, mixing with the waste from barrels that had leaked, adding to the problem.

After a report by the state’s own Environment Ministry highlighted the deteriorating state of some 125,000 now- rusty barrels of nuclear waste, the then- German Environment Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, did not beat around the bush. The dumping site in the Asse mountain range in northern Germany, containing as it did some some 100 tons of uranium and 12 tons of plutonium, had “as many holes as Swiss cheese”, he said. With engineers predicting that Asse, a former salt mine, could endure no more than seven more years before it would collapse, it was “the most problematic nuclear facility in all of Europe,” he confessed to the German mass-selling daily newspaper, Bild.

The procedural violations surrounding Asse were so outrageous that state prosecutors decided to launch a criminal investigation into the matter, and at an emergency meeting, German ministers agreed that the storage facility would henceforth be run — and the bills paid — by Germany’s Federal Office for Radioactive Protection, thus ‘nationalising the problem – and the costs. They also decided that the site will now be treated according to nuclear laws and not mining laws, meaning that the nuclear waste dumped there in the 1960s and 1970s must be made safe underground for the next 100,000 years. This appeared to require the removal of all the waste, something which would be very costly and quite challenging, the experts advised (doubtless rubbing their hands…). (rubbing their hands…)

For decades, German energy companies and government agencies had also researched a potential permanent site for highly radioactive waste at Gorleben, also in Lower Saxony, but progress has been stalled because of political differences and public protests surrounding nuclear waste dumping. In the face of continuing and furious public protests, the German government opted in 2000 to stop the research altogether.

In 2011, in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster, but also in large part due to the earlier trauma of its ‘waste’ mountain, Germany became the first major world economy to appease the public by agreeing to phase out all nuclear power – a step it had already promised once and then reversed. Yet even once the reactors are switched off, the waste problem remains. Switzerland, once among one of the ‘stars’ of the nuclear firmament, also decided to officially and formally abandon the friendly atom.

The secret store of radioactive waste near Austin is no more than a glimpse of the reality of nuclear hazards.

MARTIN COHEN for InfoWars.com

New Article on the Project In the Sudbury Star

colin — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 21:11:23 +0000

The Sudbury Star has published an article on the project. Please have a read and tell us what you think.

http://www.thesudburystar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3586211#

Accent: Communities interested in waste repositories

By RITA POLIAKOV, THE SUDBURY STAR

Updated 4 hours ago

R adioactivity is everywhere.

In comic books, its properties are magical, turning simple spider bites into transfers of superhuman abilities.

In cartoons, it makes things ooze and drip and glow an eerie green.

And in real life, it evokes just as much fear. Especially when coupled with nuclear waste.

“(Nuclear waste storage) isn’t a hole in the ground where leaky drums are sitting,” said Jo-Ann Facella, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s director of social research and dialogue.

“When we go into communities for the first time, often times, people have pictures of nuclear fuel in their minds. It’s important to help people understand what (nuclear waste is.)”

The NWMO is not only responsible for nuclear waste awareness, it’s also creating a plan to dispose of it. Or, at the very least, bury it deep in the ground where it can sit for up to one million years. Right now, the organization is looking for suitable sites, a search that has brought it to Northern Ontario several times. Of the 18 communities currently interested in hosting a nuclear waste repository — a 500- metre-deep structure that would hold used fuel bundles for hundreds of thousands of years — 11 are in Northern Ontario. They include Elliot Lake, Blind River, the North Shore and Spanish.

“We wait for communities to approach us,” Facella said at a two-day media conference, which took place in Toronto and Ottawa. “It’s going to affect people. Not just communities that are (chosen), but (those) on the transportation route.”

To understand the NWMO’s repository project, it’s important to understand nuclear waste.

The term may be a simple one, but its definition is broad. Nuclear waste is anything that contains radioactive material, “and potentially an unsafe amount,” said Pekka Sinervo, a physics professor at the University of Toronto.

“It comes from a whole bunch of sources. The most common is actually from medical procedures. There are a lot of procedures that use small amounts of radioactive materials to work effectively.”

These procedures create low-level waste, a category that also includes mop heads, rags and protective clothing used in nuclear stations. Used nuclear reactor components are examples of intermediate waste.

“The classification of low-and high-level waste is done because you dispose of it differently,” Sinervo said.

While extremely low-level waste can be incinerated, it’s the high-level waste — or used nuclear fuel — that causes a problem.

Each nuclear reactor contains about 5,000 bundles of fuel. One fuel bundle provides enough electricity to power 100 homes for a year, but only lasts around 15 to 18 months, after which point, it’s considered waste.

Right now, this waste is taken out of the reactors and immersed in water, which cools it down and reduces its radioactivity. After a minimum of 10 years, the waste is transferred to massive dry storage containers, which are made of concrete and steel, last up to 100 years and can withstand a train crash.

But this is a relatively short-term solution.

So far, there are around two million used fuel bundles being stored. By 2035, there should be about four million bundles. Eventually, the country, and most of the world, will have to come up with a long-term solution.

B reanain

Lloyd doesn’t think that solution should be a

repository.

Lloyd is a member of North

Watch, an environmentally conscious organization that focuses on Northern issues.

No matter how much information she has read, Lloyd isn’t convinced that the repository can safely hold waste for hundreds of thousands of years.

“Failure is inevitable. The debate is about how soon … will the waste migrate from the site over time. And so that is a concern,” she said. “The waste will remain hazardous beyond the ability of the container to contain it. While they talk about the rock as a primary (barrier), in fact, the rock is not a reliable barrier at all.”

According to Lloyd, underground conditions will create heat, corrosion and gas build up, all of which can affect the containers.

Instead of focusing on the long-term, Lloyd wants to see more work put into the dry storage containers.

“We should be securing the dry storage so it’s good for 200 to 300 years,” she said.

Don Howard would disagree. Howard is the director of the wastes and decommissioning division for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), which regulates the use of nuclear energy in the country.

For Howard, and the CNSC, it’s important to look beyond those 300 years.

“As we produce fuel, we produce waste. We keep storing it and storing it. At some point in time, you have to find a disposal mechanism,” he said. “We have to go out and find (a long-term solution) so we don’t leave the legacy to future generations to deal with.”

This is an argument that Facella, of the NWMO, would use.

“(The waste) is material that’s hazardous for very long periods of time … we understand that although radiation decreases over time, the chemical toxicity does not,” she said. While raw uranium, which comes from uranium mines in

Saskatchewan, can be safely held, used fuel takes hundreds of thousands of years to revert back to this level of radioactivity.

“It’s not as if we’re trying to make the decision to create this material. We have it,” she said.

Canada first started looking into long-term waste storage in 1978. In 1980, Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. was assigned the responsibility of developing a geological disposal system for nuclear waste. The idea was to bury the waste in a repository. In 1989, this concept was turned over to an environmental assessment panel, which spent 10 years assessing the plan’s plausibility. While burying the waste in a stable area was found to be safe, public outcry and lack of support forced the government to scrap the idea until 2002, when the NWMO was formed.

The organization is now responsible for creating a long-term plan that takes public opinion into account. After extensive consultations, both through workshops and online forums, the NWMO, which is funded by nuclear power producers like Ontario Power Generation, settled on building an underground facility, or repository. The facility — estimated to be take up around 100 hectares of land — would cost around $16 billion to $24 billion and would be paid for by Canada’s nuclear power producers.

In the repository, used fuel would be placed in sealed tubes made of Zircaloy, an extremely strong, corrosion resistant metal. The tubes would be put into a long-lived fuel container, which are made of copper and steel. The copper will protect against erosion and the container will stop water from seeping in and radioactivity from seeping out. Finally, a clay barrier would be built above the container, mainly because clay expands when it comes in contact with water, which would create a stronger seal.

The repository is a well-researched concept that has yet to be implemented anywhere in the world. Sweden has chosen a site for a repository, and Finland has started construction, but that’s as far as anyone’s ever gotten.

NWMO is currently working on site selection, a process that will take a minimum of seven or eight more years. After the site is selected, it will take the CNSC a minimum of five years to review the NWMO’s repository application, which includes an environmental assessment.

During the media conference, Facella emphasized the importance of choosing a willing community. This means the town must approach NWMO, and a majority of residents must be in favour of building the repository. No nuclear waste will be forced on a community, Facella said, adding that the deadline for interested communities to come forward is Sept. 30.

“It’s all about people making their own decisions. Controlling their own involvement. It won’t be imposed on someone who doesn’t want it,” she said, explaining that the repository will mean around 600 to 800 new jobs over a 10-year period.

Communities who approach the NWMO undergo a site evaluation process to make sure the land is a good fit, said Mahrez Ben Belfadhel, director of the NWMO’s geo-science department.

Initial screening takes around three months, after which the community must decide to go into the preliminary assessment phase — a longer, more thorough process.

The preferred land “must not contain ground water resources. Flowing water (isn’t) a good thing for a repository,” Belfadhel said.

Natural resources are also a deterrent. The NWMO won’t consider any area people may decide to disrupt in the future.

“The value (of the resources) may increase years from now,” Belfadhel said. Other site criteria include stability of the rocks and a safe transportation route.

I t’s

this last qualification that has

Steve May concerned. May, a member of Nuclear Free Sudbury, knows that nuclear waste would have to pass through Sudbury if a northern community is chosen.

“To get nuclear waste (to the site), all roads lead through Sudbury,” May said. While his organization isn’t necessarily an anti-nuclear group, it wants the NWMO to create a plan for transportation as early as possible, even before the site is chosen.

“We believe that the NWMO should be engaging communities along the transportation routes. That’s absolutely not the case at this point. That’s not going to happen until after the site selection process is fairly mature,” he said.

At that point, it may be too late for communities like Sudbury to voice their opinion.

“This may impact our community, despite many who believe there have been assurances that we would not become a repository,” May said.

According to Facella, it’s too early to engage communities on transportation routes.

“When a community comes into the process, they’re just learning about the project … They’re not saying they’re going to host it. If the community decides this isn’t for me, then it would have been premature to (include) folks in the transportation route,” she said. Still, there may be room for change.

“Our commitment is early involvement. If we’re hearing what we’re doing isn’t early enough, we’re going to adjust. We’re learning too,” Facella said.

rita.poliakov@sunmedia.ca

Sudbury Star reporter Rita Poliakov attended a two-day media conference on the nuclear waste repository. Travel and other expenses were paid for by the NWMO.

Interview with Hans Tammemagi

Shane — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:40:21 +0000

Over the weekend I was fortunate enough to shoot an interview with Environmental Scientist and Author Hans Tammemagi. It was great meeting him and his wife Allison at their lovely home on Pender Island. My discussion with Hans delved into some of the facts about nuclear energy and radiation, and how the public perception has been quite skewed.

It was a great interview, and if all of our interviewees are as accommodating and articulate and Hans, this is going to be a fantastic documentary.

Notes

Hans has seven published books with two book awards, one national best seller. He is co-author of Half-Lives: A Guide to Nuclear Technology in Canada.

You can find out more about him on his website at www.hanstammemagi.com.

Tom Zoellner Agree to Appear in Film

colin — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:43:05 +0000

Underground Sunshine Productions is very pleased to announce that bestselling author and journalist Tom Zoellner will appear in the upcoming film and offer his insight into the history and philosophy behind nuclear energy. Tom is the author of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World and The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire, an investigation into the diamond business reported from six continents, named a Notable Book of 2006 by the American Library Association. He was also the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book An Ordinary Man. Tom has previously worked as a contributing editor for Men’s Health magazine and as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He grew up in Arizona and is currently living in Los Angeles, California.

“Nuclear Weapons Free Zone”

Shane — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 17:15:17 +0000

When Colin and I first started down this road of making a documentary about nuclear waste in Canada, I have to admit that I was pretty naive about nuclear energy. In Red Deer where we grew up, there was a welcome sign at the entrance of the city that said “Welcome to Red Deer, Nuclear Weapons Free Zone”. It was taken down only a few years ago, but for most of my life there was a sign at the entrance of the city bragging about the fact that there was nothing nuclear there. We always kind of took it as a bit of a joke, because I don’t think there was a huge concern from people about a small city in Central Alberta having access to the bomb.

Now I find out that in Vancouver, where I’m currently living, there is a similar sign.

Nuclear energy always seemed like something that wasn’t a part of the Canada I grew up in. True, the two provinces that I’ve lived in (Alberta and BC) don’t have nuclear power plants, but I’ve been to every province in Canada, and have never driven past a reactor. I would have definitely taken notice of that.

Nuclear is a taboo subject, but nuclear power is more prevalent in Canada than I thought. There are nuclear power plants in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick; with other provinces seriously looking at building their own nuclear reactors.

Speaking personally, I would have to say that coming into this project, the vast majority of my knowledge of nuclear energy was based on public opinion, and third hand information. Through the process of making this documentary, I’m very much looking forward to separating fact from fiction. For now, I’ll sleep better knowing there isn’t a nuclear bomb in my backyard.

Shoot in Saugeen Shores

colin — Mon, 28 May 2012 01:17:22 +0000

Underground Sunshine Productions was fortunate enough is have its first official film shoot for the upcoming documentary a few weeks ago in beautiful Saugeen Shores. The shoot consisted of interviewing some of the local activists from the Save Our Shores (SOS) group as well as Mayor Mike Smith. Saugeen Shores is such a beautiful community and the crew was deeply inspired by the genuine hospitality of the community. We certainly look forward to going back and speaking more with the people and their learning about their concerns.

The Dates Are Set

Shane — Mon, 14 May 2012 03:32:29 +0000

The making of any documentary is a long road, and a lot of work has already been done laying the foundation for this one. A very important step is obviously setting the shooting dates. We will begin principle photography August 2012. We will be hitting the road and traveling around Ontario interviewing a number of people involved in this issue. So the clock is officially ticking.