“The successful operation of [beyond visual line of sight drones] will enable us to detect threats from marine ingress at an earlier state and prevent disruption to the power plant,” Monica Rivas Casado, a senior lecturer in environmental monitoring at Cranfield, said. In the United Kingdom, 20 percent of electricity is nuclear, a percentage roughly equaled in the United States, compared with approximately 10 percent globally.

Blooms of translucent jellyfish with their trailing, stinging tentacles are sometimes described as “invasions” because they often emerge en masse in way that appears sudden. Still, determined observers may find early clues of a jellyfish bloom. Spotting jellyfish swarms by way of drones requires balancing recognition accuracy with recognition speed—at least if the goal is to take preventative action to avoid nuclear power plant disruption. Scientists have been at work developing algorithms that foster this balance, including one study that delivered results within a desirable timeframe and over 90 percent accuracy.

In another early-detection effort, scientists have investigated the potential for acoustic characteristics of these sea creatures to detect their numbers, density, and threat level. The creatures’ underwater undulations create sounds—known as “echo energy” or “acoustic scatterings”—that give them away, as long as humans are willing to listen.

The clash between gelatinous jellyfish and hulking nuclear power plants has a long history. These spineless, brainless, bloodless creatures shut down the Torness nuclear power plant in 2011 at a cost of approximately $1.5 million per day, according to one estimate. Swarms of these invertebrates have also been responsible for nuclear power plant shutdowns in Israel, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sweden.

Humans have unwittingly nurtured the adversarial relationship between jellyfish and nuclear power plants. That is, human-induced climate change has raised ocean water temperatures, setting conditions for larger-than-usual jellyfish populations. Further, the relatively warm water near nuclear power plant discharge outlets may attract jellyfish swarms, according to one study. Also, pollution has lowered oxygen levels in sea water, which jellyfish tolerate more than other marine animals, leading to their proliferation.

Some look at jellyfish and see elegant ballerinas of the sea, while others view them as pests. Either way, they are nothing if not resilient. Jellyfish are 95 percent water, drift in topical waters and the Arctic Ocean, and thrive in the ocean’s bottom as well as on its surface. Nuclear power plant operators might take note: Older-than-dinosaur jellyfish are likely here to stay.

The countries that have nuclear weapons – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, UK, France, Russia and China) as well as India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea – have all learned how to separate plutonium from used nuclear fuel for use in weapons. This is done by dissolving the solid fuel assemblies in a hot, highly radioactive chemical bath from which the plutonium is extracted using basic scientific procedures. Any technology for extracting plutonium from used fuel is called reprocessing.

Nuclear advocates have long dreamed of using plutonium as a reactor fuel, thereby increasing the options for new reactor designs and magnifying the longevity of the nuclear age. The problem is, once plutonium has been extracted, it can be used either for weapons or for fuel at the discretion of the country possessing it. Policing methods can be circumvented. As Edward Teller has observed: “There is no such thing as a foolproof system because the fool is always greater than the proof.”

That’s how India exploded its first atomic bomb in 1974, by using plutonium created in a Canadian research reactor given as a gift to India and a reprocessing plant provided by the US. Both the reactor and the reprocessing plant had been designated as “peaceful” facilities intended for non-military use. India declared that the bomb it had detonated was a “Peaceful Nuclear Explosive.”

After the Indian blast, it was quickly determined that several other clients of Canadian technology – South Korea, Argentina, Taiwan, and Pakistan – were also in a position to develop a plutonium-based bomb program. Swift and decisive international action forestalled those threats. In particular, South Korea and Taiwan were discouraged by their US ally from pursuing reprocessing.

Shaken by these shocking developments, in 1977 US President Jimmy Carter – the only head of state ever trained as a nuclear engineer – banned the civilian extraction of plutonium in America and tried to have reprocessing banned worldwide, because of the danger that this nuclear bomb material could fall into the hands of criminals, terrorists, or militaristic regimes bent on building their own nuclear explosive devices. As one White House adviser remarked, “We might wake up and find Washington DC gone, and not even know who did it.”

Japan is the only country without nuclear weapons that extracts plutonium from used nuclear fuel, much to the dismay of its neighbours. South Korea is not allowed to do so, despite repeated efforts by South Korea to obtain permission from the US to use a type of reprocessing technology called “pyroprocessing.” Pyroprocessing is currently undergoing experimental tests at a US nuclear laboratory in Idaho.

Now, New Brunswick has been enticed to take the plutonium plunge. The company Moltex Energy, recently established in Saint John from the UK, wants to use plutonium as a nuclear fuel in a type of reactor that is not yet fully conceptualized. The plutonium would be extracted from the thousands of solid irradiated nuclear fuel bundles currently stored at NB Power’s Point Lepreau reactor using a version of the pyroprocessing technology that South Korea has so far been denied.

On a site right beside the Bay of Fundy, the highly radioactive metallic fuel bundles would be dissolved in molten salt at a temperature of several hundred degrees. A strong electrical current would be used to strip the plutonium metal and a few other elements (less than one percent of the mass) out of the dissolved fuel.

After the government of Canada gave $50.5 million to support the Moltex project in March this year, nine retired US government advisors – all of them experts in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons – wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May, urging him to authorize an independent review of the international implications of the proposed New Brunswick plutonium scheme.

These nine experts, who have worked under six different US presidents, both Republican and Democrat, are deeply concerned that Canada’s support for reprocessing and the civilian use of plutonium could seriously undermine delicate and precarious global non-proliferation efforts that have been underway for many decades.

No reply from the Canadian government has so far been received, although Trudeau’s office acknowledged receipt of the letter and said that the matter has been entrusted to Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau and Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan.

Without any word from these two ministers, Moltex posted a response to the US experts’ letter on their corporate web site, disputing some of the claims made in the letter to Trudeau. In particular, Moltex claims that their proposed technology is not usable for nuclear weapons purposes because the plutonium is not pure, but mixed with other contaminants that cannot easily be removed.

The Moltex response has prompted another letter to Trudeau from the US non-proliferation experts, correcting this and several other misleading comments from Moltex and reiterating their call for a fully independent expert review of the non-proliferation aspects of the Moltex proposal.

Our political leaders seem oblivious to the dangers to the entire planet that could result from widespread access to plutonium. If Canada can access plutonium, so can any other country. If many countries have access to plutonium, the possession of nuclear weapons must be regarded as a real possibility. In a nuclear-armed world, any conflict anywhere can turn into a nuclear war. The stakes could not be greater.

Citizens of New Brunswick and all Canadians who realize the importance of this issue can write to our Prime Minister in support of a non-proliferation review of the Moltex proposal, and raise this matter with candidates and at the door during the next federal election campaign. We can all raise awareness of the legacy of Nagasaki and do our best to ensure that New Brunswick is not implicated by going ahead with the Moltex plutonium extraction scheme.

Pelleting is the cooking of natural uranium fuel powder, at 1650 degrees centigrade, to form ceramic pellets that go into nuclear reactor fuel rods. 
The factory will process over 150 tonnes of uranium per month to provide fuel for half of all nuclear energy produced in Canada. 
The decision to allow nuclear fuel pellet production in the downtown core is being challenged in court by a local group called Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) with the help of lawyers from the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA). 
CARN alleges that the regulator unlawfully granted a ten-year licence to BWXT on the grounds that BWXT omitted details about the proposed operation’s physical design and environmental monitoring program which are required by the Nuclear Safety Control Act. 
Although lawyers for CELA will ask the court to declare the licence to pellet unlawful, it is very unlikely that there is an Erin Brockovichesque moment in the cards because they are essentially arguing on a technicality.
That technicality will conceivably force BWXT to reveal potentially damaging information about their plans for the Peterborough-Nogojiwanong site that they would not like the public to know.
The information will include where they will be positioning the stacks that release uranium into the air. 
In Toronto there are six stacks that release uranium into the air in all directions from the plant in a residential neighbourhood.  
A detailed site and environmental monitoring plan would reveal if they are intending to release alpha-radiation emitting uranium particles in the direction of the Prince of Wales School or just on the rest of the downtown. 
If required by the court, a detailed site plan may also reveal if BWXT is planning on moving the goal posts yet again to include working with highly radioactive enriched uranium to fuel a fleet of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) currently in development. 
BWXT is a leader in developing SMNR technology in Canada backed by the federal government. In a January 2020 interview CARN representative Jane Scott said, “I am sure it is their plan to work with enriched uranium because Canada is investing a lot of money in small modular reactors which require enriched uranium.”
According to Scott, “we can see a lot of hits on our http://www.nopellets.ca website from places in the US where small modular reactor businesses are located, a company called NuScale wants to make small modular reactors in Canada and has partnerships with Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, and BWXT in the United States.”
Scott first got involved in the fight against BWXT (formerly General Electric-Hitachi Peterborough) in 2010 when Arthur broke a story on how the company had received permission in secret in 2009 to process enriched uranium without consulting the public.
BWXT has refused to rule out the possibility of working with enriched uranium.
In January 2020 I asked BWXT spokesperson Natalie Cutler the following question, “Can you guarantee local communities that you will never bring any enriched uranium on site in Toronto or Peterborough in the future?”
Cutler claimed “We have no plans to seek a change to our licence to allow us to process enriched uranium.”
For context, BWXT also claimed it had “no plans” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong but were seeking the “flexibility” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong “should the need arise.” 
According to Kerrie Blaise, the lawyer representing CARN, BWXT denied multiple requests to share their business plan with the public. 

Citing BWXT’s proximity to the Prince of Wales Elementary School, CARN media representative Bill Templeman suggests that if BWXT wanted to conduct pelleting outside of Peterborough on “unused land,” it wouldn’t be an issue.  
According to Trent Alum, Shaelyn Wabegijig, who is Algonquin Timiskaming First Nation Caribou Clan, German and Irish, the notion of “unused” land is a colonial concept rooted in the concept of “terra nullius” (no one’s land) and the Doctrine of Discovery which was used as justification for the colonial dispossession of sovereign Indigenous Nations.  
Wabegijig, who works as the Program and Outreach Coordinator at the Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC), says the members of CARN are “people who are speaking out and trying to protect our community from danger and disease.”
According to Wabegijig, the people living near the plant deserve “communication and transparency on their own terms to determine if they want this in their neighbourhood, and a stark majority say no.” 

Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.

And yes, there are scammers. There are real issues and real conflicts to be explored in seeking to prevent the collapse of our life support systems. But they are handled so clumsily and incoherently by this film that watching it is like seeing someone start a drunken brawl over a spilled pint, then lamping his friends when they try to restrain him. It stumbles so blindly into toxic issues that Moore, former champion of the underdog, unwittingly aligns himself with white supremacists and the extreme right.

Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since 2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power.

There are also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.

Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The footage was shot in Turkey.

There is also a real story to be told about the co-option and capture of some environmental groups by the industries they should hold to account. A remarkable number of large conservation organisations take money from fossil fuel companies. This is a disgrace. But rather than pinning the blame where it lies, Planet of the Humans concentrates its attacks on Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, who takes no money from any of his campaigning work. It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, but unfortunately it has horrible, real-world consequences, as McKibben now faces even more threats and attacks than he confronted before.

But this is by no means the worst of it. The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. “We really have got to start dealing with the issue of population … without seeing some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.”

Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.

Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down.

We have been here many times before. Dozens of films have spread falsehoods about environmental activists and ripped into green technologies, while letting fossil fuels off the hook. But never before have these attacks come from a famous campaigner for social justice, rubbing our faces in the dirt.

In 1976, the United Kingdom started operating a new reactor class, the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, and 15 such reactors still operate today. To reprocess spent fuel from these reactors as well as spent fuel from overseas, the United Kingdom opened the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant in 1995. Its operation record is a disaster: It never reached planned throughputs, had a serious leakage of radioactive material in 2005, and was much more expensive than originally intended. Consequently, it was shut down in 2018 before reaching the end of its planned service life—and after separating only 23 metric tons of plutonium.

But what happened to the fast breeder reactors that were supposed to burn up reprocessed fuel and close the nuclear fuel cycle? There are several reasons why there are only two fast reactors commercially operating, the Russian-designed BN-600 and BN-800. First, nuclear energy did not expand as foreseen in the 1950s and 1960s, while at the same time new uranium resources were discovered, easing worries about a dwindling uranium supply. Second, multi-cycled use of spent fuel has proven to be far more difficult than expected, and there are some risks inherent only to fast reactors. Finally, there is the latent proliferation risk of the technology to separate plutonium and uranium from the spent fuel.

Where will it go? Today, the United Kingdom’s civilian stockpile contains 139 metric tons of plutonium, including 23 metric tons owned by other countries, mostly Japan. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has discussed two disposition options. First is the reuse of plutonium in reactors. Reuse is touted as a proliferation-resistant option because the spent fuel would be too radioactive to handle, at least at first. Second is immobilization. Here, the plutonium is mixed with other materials that reduce the risk of leaching and complicate extraction. Potentially, the radioactive waste in the mix could also serve as a toxic obstacle to proliferation. Both options would still ultimately require disposal in a deep geological repository.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s preferred option still seems to be the reuse of the plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel for light water reactors. However, such an option depends on the availability and willingness of reactor operators to use such fuel. And not all operators are keen on the idea: EDF, the French-owned utility company that operates Hinkley Point C, the first nuclear power plant built in Britain in decades, denied the suggestion to consider the use of mixed-oxide fuel in 2013.

Alternatively, the plutonium might be used in reactors that, according to their vendors, are better suited to cope with the plutonium stockpile. These could be either a CANDU-EC6 heavy water reactor or the small, fast, sodium-cooled reactor concept PRISM. Using mixed-oxide fuel in CANDU reactors seems viable, but the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority assesses no potential benefit compared to using the same fuel in a light water reactor—at greater implementation risk. In March 2019, the authority officially removed the PRISM reactor from the list of viable options, though even as early as 2011 it was stated internally that the “technology maturity for the fuel, reactor, and recycling plant are considered to be low.”

Nevertheless, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority confirms that it will continue to monitor fast reactor programs.

Leaving aside the viability of fuel production, costs, and everything related to actual operation of the PRISM reactor, we conducted an analysis of GE Hitachi’s claims that PRISM “could conceivably make the entire UK plutonium stockpile proliferation-resistant in 20 years” by irradiation. Our calculations show that the claim is highly optimistic. Using plutonium as a reactor fuel has two effects: Some plutonium is burned, and the remaining is left in highly radioactive spent fuel. The radioactivity creates a barrier for malicious actors intending to steal and separate the plutonium from that fuel—providing proliferation resistance. However, due to radioactive decay, this barrier continuously decreases, while treatment of other parts of the stockpile is underway. Even though our study’s findings apply specifically to the PRISM reactor, we anticipate similar effects from other irradiation options. In the time it takes to treat the United Kingdom’s massive stockpile in reactors, the already treated material will slowly lose its proliferation resistance.

Why should the public sector continue to pay money for “new” reactor concepts—sometimes under development for decades—when it is not even clear whether these concepts might solve the problem at hand? The United Kingdom has to find a solution for its plutonium stockpile, and quickly. The British government, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and reactor operators in general should accept that separated plutonium is a burden, not a resource, and authority should again take a closer look at immobilization options. These do not have the sheen of new, high-tech solutions like burning the plutonium in specially-tailored reactor concepts. But given that action is urgently needed, established and working concepts should be the way forward.”

Link: https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/britain-has-139-tons-of-plutonium-thats-a-real-problem

You can read more about radon baths here.

Title: Thousands Of People Are ‘Treated’ With Radon Baths Every Year In Ukraine
Author: Masis, Julie
Publication(s): Public Radio International (PRI)
Date: 8 July 2016
Link: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-08/ukraine-thousands-people-are-treated-radon-baths-every-year

Title: A Spa Where Patients Bathe In Radioactive Water
Author: Vickery, Matthew
Publication(s): BBC Future
Date: 7 March 2018
Link: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180306-a-spa-where-patients-bathe-in-radiactive-water

A short BBC documentary about Jácymov, Czechia additionally discusses radon baths, in addition to the towns mining history.

Title: The Radioactive ‘Capital’ Of The World
Author: BBC Reel
Publication(s): BBC Reel
Date: 4 February 2020
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_LXYsdY9O4

Specific deficiencies noted by the IAEA include:

Canada’s regulator is considering allowing future nuclear facilites (such as small modular reactors) and old radioactively contaminated nuclear reactors to be entombed and abandoned on site, a practice that is explicitly rejected by the IAEA;
The IAEA found “no evidence… of a governmental policy or strategy related to radioactive waste management”;
Canada’s nuclear legislation does not require justification of radiation risks from nuclear facilities; the IAEA says for nuclear facilities and activities to be considered justified, the benefits must be shown to outweigh the radiation risks to which they give rise;
Canada’s system for managing the transport of radioactive materials does not align with IAEA regulations;
There are problems in the ways that Canada authorizes radiation releases from nuclear facilities;
Canada’s current and proposed regulations don’t adequately protect pregnant workers, students, and apprentices from radiation risks; eg. they allow four times higher radiation doses for pregnant nuclear workers than IAEA standards.
“These deficiencies concern us very much,” said Dr. Éric Notebaert of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. “We feel strongly that Canada is failing to adequately protect Canadians from dangerous radioactive substances that are known to cause cancers, serious chronic diseases, birth defects, and genetic damage that is passed on to future generations.”

The letter to the Prime Minister points out that these gaps in Canada’s nuclear safety practices, identified by the IAEA and others, leaves Canada vulnerable to unwise decisions on investment in new nuclear technology.

“Canada’s rush to promote and invest in small modular nuclear reactors is ill-advised” said Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, “especially when these reactors have been exempted from environmental assessment. Such reactors will produce radioactive wastes of all varieties, yet there is no policy for their safe long-term disposition. With no need to “justify” the radiation exposures from such new reactors, entrepreneurs and provinces can proceed without any explicit consideration of faster, cheaper and lower risk energy alternatives to reduce carbon emissions.”

The letter also draws attention to nuclear governance problems cited in Environmental Petition 427 to the Auditor General of Canada. These include (1) outdated and inadequate legislation, (2) inadequate government oversight, (3) lack of checks and balances, (4) a federal policy vacuum on nuclear waste and nuclear reactor decommissioning, and (5) the problem of regulatory capture on the part of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
The authors of the letter support the recommendation in Petition 427 for the creation of a high-level, interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder task force to advise the government on the needed reforms to nuclear governance in Canada.

Contacts:
Dr. Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility514-489-5118 cell: 514-839-7214 ccnr@web.ca
Dr. Ole Hendrickson, Ottawa River Institute613-234-0578 ole@nrtco.net

Links:
Letter to the Prime Minister, April 3, 2020:http://ccnr.org/Letter_Trudeau_03_04_2020_e.pdf

IAEA Report: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/documents/review-missions/irrs_canada_2019_final_report.pdf

Environmental Petition 427 to the Auditor General of Canada, June 2019. Petition summary:https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/pet_427_e_43421.html Full text of petition: https://concernedcitizens.net/2019/11/30/environmental-petition-nuclear-governance-problems-in-canada”
Link: https://concernedcitizens.net/2020/04/08/groups-urge-trudeau-to-fix-serious-gaps-in-nuclear-safety-and-governance

2) How accurate is presently-used data in regards to the efficacy and power of the United States nuclear weapons fleet? I hope that nuclear weapons are never actually used, though it would be alarming to consider that some weapons may not work as intended, or may have inaccurate estimates as to their power.

3) Do other countries have similar errors in their nuclear weapons-related data?

The Seeker video on this project – linked below – alarmingly notes: “the U.S. detonated over 200 nuclear weapons to gather scientific data about their potential. That data was gospel for years, until a weapons physicist decades later found out the figures were off by huge margins.”

See also other comments on this website regarding other bomb components now aging past their lifespan – such as the aerogel FOGBANK – resulting in degradation of bomb and weapon components. Concerns were voiced in the late 2000s regarding manufacturing of the aerogel FOGBANK, as this compound is/was classified and many people who know how to make it have either died, were senile, and/or are retired. There were several articles a few years ago (pre 2007-2008) discussing concerns that the United States may not have all the relevant information to restart FOGBANK manufacturing programs. Los Alamos Laboratories in their Nuclear Weapons Journal [Issue 2, 2009] (linked below) discusses various challenges in the manufacturing of FOGBANK – which restarted in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Archiving the nuclear test footage is important. However, it is alarming to consider that governmental discussions are oriented around modernizing nuclear weapons, rather than dismantling them.

Here are references to some articles and videos (arranged alphabetically by author’s surname / project name) discussing the nuclear weapons tests films preservation project:

How To Watch a Declassified Nuclear Test Film Like A Weapons Physicist
By Rachel Becker
The Verge, 13 May 2017
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/13/15633380/nuclear-test-film-declassified-weapons-physicist-watch

Title: Physicist Declassifies Rescued Nuclear Test Films
Author: O’Brien, Nolan
Publication(s): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Date: 14 March 2017
Link: https://www.llnl.gov/news/physicist-declassifies-rescued-nuclear-test-films

Title: Declassified Nuclear Test Films Reveal Hidden Truths About Our Atomic Past
Author: Seeker
Publication(s): Seeker
Date: 3 August 2017
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-QVPXBcxLU

Title: Preserving the Past to Protect the Future
Author: Spriggs, Dr. Greg and Auten, Holly
Publication(s): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Date: October/November 2017
Link: https://str.llnl.gov/october-2017/spriggs
Article Publication Link (Direct) : https://str.llnl.gov/content/pages/october-2017/pdf/10.17.1.pdf

FOGBANK-related articles:

Title: Did America Forget How To Make The H-Bomb?
Author: Baumann, Nick
Publication(s): Mother Jones
Date: 1 May 2009
Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/fogbank-america-forgot-how-make-nuclear-bombs/

Title: FOGBANK
Author: Lewis, Jeffrey
Publication(s): Arms Control Wonk
Date: 7 March 2008
Link: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/

Title: Fogbank: Lost Knowledge Regained
Author: Lillard, Jennifer
Publication(s): Nuclear Weapons Journal [Los Alamos National Laboratory] (2009 Edition, Issue 2, Pages 20-21)
Date: 2009
Link: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf

Title: Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used in Nukes That’s So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is
Author: Trevithick, Joseph
Publication(s): The Drive: The Warzone
Date: 3 April 2020
Link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is

Rachel Maddow additionally discusses how “no one today remembers the exact formula for making [FOGBANK]” on page 221 in Chapter 9 (called “An $8 Trillion Fungus Among Us”) in her book “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” (2012). As such, FOGBANK has been a bit of a reverse engineering challenge. This chapter additionally discusses a few of the many maintenance-related challenges of the US nuclear weapons fleet, such as nuclear weapons’ external components simply falling apart from age. Maddow further notes corrosion and fungal growth on external components of nuclear missiles is a particular challenge for military bases in Louisiana, due to the humid and warm subtropical climate.

Apparently – according to Maddow – the engineering of some type of fuses for nuclear weapons was forgotten as well, as the old engineers who created them passed away before anyone thought to document the manufacturing process in detail. Another concern is that nuclear weapons may be undergoing unknown or unpredictable chemical reactions within their various components as they age. Stray vapours from an ICBM already caused an explosion in the 1980s – near the Ozarks in Arkansas. Could each nuclear weapon be a ticking, dirty, time bomb (even if not intentionally used)? Yikes.

An excerpt from Maddow’s chapter is available here: https://publicism.info/politics/drift/10.html

The Swiss decision to quit nuclear power was upheld in a 2017 referendum which also supported government plans to push forward sustainable energy with subsidies to develop solar, wind and hydroelectric power.

No dates have been set for the shutdown of Switzerland’s other nuclear power stations, although the Beznau plant near the German border, which dates back to 1969, is expected to be next.

As recently as 2017, Switzerland’s nuclear power stations generated a third of the country’s power, compared with around 60% from hydroelectric and 5% from renewable.

Muehleberg’s operator, the state-controlled energy company BKW, decided in October 2013 to shutter the plant, saying plans to invest in its long-term future were no longer viable.

Output has been winding down in the last few weeks as the final fuel loaded in the summer of 2018 was depleted.

After the shutdown, a 15-year decommissioning process will get under way, costing 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.06 billion). No plans have been agreed for how the site will be redeveloped.

Shutting down Muehleberg has generated mixed emotions.

“There is a lot of Swiss know-how in the power plant. Old valves, for example, which still come from (Swiss engineering company) Sulzer. A piece of factory and economic history is lost,” said one worker, who asked not to be named.

“It also hurts when we cut up everything that we have nurtured over the years.”

Anti-nuclear campaigners, however, hailed the move.

“Clearly, we welcome the decision to close the plant,” said Philippe de Rougement, president of the campaign group Sortir du Nucleaire. “We would have loved it to close much earlier.”

Switzerland’s use of nuclear energy had delayed its development of renewable energy sources, he said.

“Nuclear energy was a grave mistake for Switzerland. We have had the electricity, but the future generations will have to manage the toxic waste and they won’t thank us.””
Link: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-nuclearpower/switzerland-switches-off-nuclear-plant-as-it-begins-exit-from-atomic-power-idUSKBN1YO19J

Other operators, however, are already seeing the spread of the infection slow things down. In Great Britain, authorities announced they are shutting down a nuclear fuel reprocessing site at Sellafield after 8 percent of its 11,500-strong staff were forced to self-isolate to avoid infection. The move came after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus last week, and will lead to a gradual shutdown of the site’s Magnox facility, which is slated to close permanently later this year.

Sellafield told employees that it would work to “make best use of available people”.

France, the world’s most nuclear dependent nation, announced staff reductions at its Flameville plant in the country’s north. The EDF, France’s national nuclear operator, said that, due to high regional infection rates, it was reducing the staff at the plant from 800 to 100. As early as March 10, EDF reported that three workers at nuclear power plants had tested positive for the virus.

A spokesman for the Flameville plant told Reuters that “we have decided to only keep those in charge of safety and security” working while the coronavirus crisis runs its course.

French grid operator RTE expects nuclear availability to stay 3.6GW below the 2015 to 2019 average and likewise predicts a national drop in nuclear demand.

Taken together, the emergency responses of national nuclear operators are symptoms of a big problem that Covid-19 posed to the nuclear sector, Mycle Schneider and independent energy and nuclear policy analyst told Power Technology Magazine.

“Covid-19 constitutes an unprecedented threat on sensitive strategic infrastructure, above all the power sector,” he said.

“The French case sheds light on a fundamental societal safety and security issue that got little attention in the current Covid-19 crisis. Operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants draw on a small group of highly specialized technicians and engineers.”

Because of that very level of specialization, some in the US nuclear industry are considering simply isolating nuclear plant technicians onsite in a sort of preventative quarantine.

Maria Korsnick, head of the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute told the New York Times that plants are “considering measures to isolate a core group to run the plant, stockpiling ready-to-eat meals and disposable tableware, laundry supplies and personal care items.”

The US Department of Homeland Security is responsible for working with nuclear power plant operators to maintain their operations during a national emergency. On Thursday, the department issued guidelines that echoed the ones suggested by Korsnick.

“When continuous remote work is not possible, businesses should enlist strategies to reduce the likelihood of spreading the disease,” the DHS said in a memo, according to Power Magazine. “This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, separating staff by off-setting shift hours or days and/or social distancing.”

Roy Palk, president and CEO of New Horizons Consulting, which advises energy companies in the US, told the magazine that, “There are a lot of unanswered questions because this is not a model everyone is used to working with.”

To keep the lights on, he said, utilities and power plant operators might have to consider keeping staff onsite for the long term.

“These operators have a license to operate, they’re highly skilled, highly trained. They have to be certified.” he told the magazine. “These individuals need to be on the job, they need to be healthy. They have a big obligation to the public.”

Reuters contacted a dozen other power providers, all of whom said they were implementing plans to moderate risks to their employees and to ensure continuity of service, but who declined to comment on whether sequestering staff was a possibility.

In New York, Consolidated Edison Inc, which provides power to around 3.3 million customers and gas to about 1.1 million customers in New York City and Westchester County – both of which are under virus lockdowns – said it was taking steps to keep critical employees healthy, including separating some control center personnel to other locations where they can perform their work.

Duke Energy Corp, which provides power to 7.7 million customers in six states and gas to 1.6 million customers in five states, said it instituted additional worker screening measures, such as temperature checks, at generating and other critical facilities.

Puget Sound Energy, which serves more than 1.5 million customers in the Seattle, Washington area – a region hard hit by coronavirus – said all non-essential workers are working remotely, and the utility has limited access to facilities that provide critical operations.”
Link: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2020-03-covid-19-could-cause-staff-shortages-in-the-nuclear-power-industry

“I was coated like flour in radium dust as it leaked from the heavy bags on my back. It gets into your clothes, hair, mouth and hands. During the long barge trips across the lake and down the Bear and Mackenzie we would sleep and sit on the sacks.”

In Ottawa, mining officials were warned that exposure to radium dust was harmful. (Radium is a radioactive metal found in uranium.) The information was kept secret.

Local children also played with the ore and waste from the mine was dumped into Great Bear Lake. Dene women used the discarded sacks as shelters.

“Our canvas tents were all worn out and could not keep the rain out very well. Because the men worked as labourers for the mine, they kept ripped ore bags and brought these back for us to use. I made three tents from these bags. ”

After the war, the Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake would become known as the village of widows, because so many of the men die of cancer.

At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the uranium was used to develop the first atomic bomb in a feverish race that brought together dozens of scientists. Howe offered Albertas wide-open spaces as a test site for the new weapon but the Americans preferred the New Mexico desert.

The atomic bomb was successfully tested on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Then on August 6, the American bomber Enola Gay, flew over Japan and dropped the atomic bomb code-named Fat Man on Hiroshima, a city of 343,000. Sixty per cent of the city was razed by the blast, and 100,000 people died immediately, with tens of thousands dying of radiation poisoning within several months.”
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP14CH2PA3LE.html

Around 20 million shipments of nuclear and other radioactive material are regularly transported within countries and across borders each year. These materials are used in industry, agriculture and medicine, as well as in education. Some of them are also radioactive sources that are no longer useful, known as disused sources.

The aim of nuclear security during transport is to ensure that the material is secured throughout and that it is not used for criminal or malicious purposes. While the level of security differs depending on the sensitivity of the material, the fundamental elements of secure transport include physical protection, administrative measures, training and protection of information about the transport routes and schedule. In some cases, escort personnel may also need to be armed.

Some of the major challenges with transport include the fluidity of the situation and the need to continually assess any potential threats and adjust the plans accordingly.

“At a stationary facility, it is easier to protect a radioactive source, or a disused source, through the facility’s security systems and measures as well as its layers of defense. When it is in transport, there are many more variables, people involved and context changes with every mile travelled. Even an incident as small as a minor traffic collision could freeze the flow of traffic and paralyze the movement of people and goods,” Ladsous said.

To prepare for all possible scenarios, the professionals involved, such as operators, regulators, police, military, and health and environmental agencies, have to use agreed operational procedures and communication methods. These coordinated efforts are guided by legislation and regulations that designate appropriate responsibilities to the relevant authorities, outline communication procedures and ensure sufficient financial support. When this coordination occurs internationally, it involves all relevant customs and transit authorities, which is often facilitated with support from the IAEA.

“During conversion of our research reactor from high enriched to low enriched uranium fuel, we had to transport highly radioactive spent reactor fuel from the site to the airport to be sent back to the original manufacturer, and we had to transport the new low enriched uranium fuel from the airport to the facility,” said Yusuf A. Ahmed, Director of the Centre for Energy Research and Training in Nigeria, who was involved in the conversion project. “Although the transport time is only a few hours, there is a lot that can happen during that time, from simple traffic accidents to malicious interventions and sabotage of shipments.”

Upon request, the IAEA also helps countries to draft regulations associated with transport security. In 2019, the IAEA supported more than 15 countries in drafting transport security requirements.

“As a country embarking on nuclear power, we will be transporting a significant amount of nuclear material and radioactive sources on our roads,” said Sami Sulaiman, Chairman of the Egyptian Nuclear and Radiological Regulatory Authority. “In early 2020, we will have a decree, drafted with IAEA assistance, that will strictly regulate any movement of such material.”

While only around 30 countries use nuclear power and therefore have significant amounts of nuclear materials to transport, almost all countries use radioactive sources. The IAEA assists countries with the security of disused sources. Such sources are beyond their useful life but can remain radioactive for a long time and frequently require transport to temporary storage facilities or permanent repositories.

“Whether it’s a disused source or radioactive material that’s ready for use, these materials need well-coordinated nuclear security systems and measures to minimize the vulnerabilities of transport and strengthen nuclear security overall,” Ladsous said.”
Link: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/a-moving-target-nuclear-security-during-transport

Trump’s tweet acknowledges the fierce and long-standing opposition to Yucca Mountain in a swing state he lost by a slim margin in 2016. The Democratic presidential candidates are unanimously opposed to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

A permanent impasse. Yucca Mountain has spent much of its existence as a political football. The original Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required detailed characterization of three potential repository sites for the disposal of the nation’s spent commercial nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons complex. By 1986 it was clear that work on three sites would be very costly, and Congress balked at the price tag. Political wrangling ensued, and it was no accident that among the three states under consideration—Nevada, Texas, and Washington—the one with the most-junior congressional delegation, including a newly elected Senator Harry Reid, was selected as the only site to be characterized by the Energy Department for suitability as a repository.

Thereafter, appropriation of funds for work on Yucca Mountain was continuously subject to political whims in Congress. Senator Reid, for instance, repeatedly blocked funding for Yucca Mountain after the House had approved it. And it’s an old adage among US nuclear waste experts that nothing ever happens with nuclear waste during an election year.

At the moment, no one involved in the process has an incentive to make progress. An extremely partisan House and Senate are at a permanent impasse on an issue that bears little on re-election chances (except in Nevada). The nuclear industry has found they can build new reactors—the two Westinghouse AP1000 units under construction in Georgia—without a solution to their spent fuel problem. The Energy Department, originally tasked with solving the problem, has no legal authority (or appropriations) to move forward. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which passed a Continued Storage Rule in 2014, vacated its ability to force a solution. And many anti-nuclear interest groups that oppose waste transport and repositories have called for “hardened on-site storage.”

Pressure to do something is building, though, as more reactors shut down around the country. Since 2013, nine reactors have permanently closed, and by 2025 at least six more are slated to join them. These 15 will join the 12 reactors already shut down, for a total of 27 around the country. Eleven of them have been or are being completely decommissioned, so all that will remain on site will be the spent fuel, awaiting a solution. Leaving spent fuel in dry storage in perpetuity is not a solution: The casks won’t last forever and will need to be changed out periodically (experts do not yet know how long they will last). Can the American public ensure that a benevolent government will exist 50, 100, or 1,000 years from now to carry out this task? We cannot.

“Solutions” that aren’t. Both President Trump and Undersecretary Menezes referenced “innovative approaches” to dealing with spent nuclear fuel. Are there actual alternatives to a repository at Yucca Mountain? There might be alternatives to the Yucca Mountain site, but there is no escaping the need for a deep geologic repository to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. Numerous studies have come to this conclusion, including the US National Research Council, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future established by the Obama administration to consider alternative strategies of nuclear waste disposal (I served on the commission), and a recent report out of Stanford and George Washington Universities (I was on the steering committee for the report).

Ideas such as “advanced” reactors that use waste as fuel, deep borehole disposal, and the perpetually-proposed reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel have all been presented as solutions to our current dilemma. None are. Studies that my colleagues and I have done, and the National Research Council consensus report, show that all reactors and reprocessing schemes produce wastes that are highly active and long-lived and therefore still require disposal.

The Trump administration appears interested in reviving reprocessing as a “solution” for spent nuclear fuel. It’s not a solution, simply a costly management strategy. The few countries that still reprocess spent fuel, such as France, plan to use a geologic repository for the high-level waste produced. France, in fact, has already selected a site for its repository. Even if somehow, as some claim, reprocessing reduced wastes to those dominated by 30-year half-lives, a repository would still be required as, again, institutions cannot be guaranteed to last 300 years, the amount of time needed for the waste to fully decay. With impending climate-change effects such as significant sea level rise by 2100, who knows what the world will look like in 300 years, both physically and politically?

Deep boreholes, though perhaps appropriate for some radioactive wastes, would be hard-pressed to handle spent fuel due in part to the narrow borehole diameter, limited to thin-walled canisters that can only hold one spent fuel assembly each. The thin walls and significantly more numerous canisters would increase worker doses and reduce the canisters’ strength to resist the overlying rock burden. The depth of the boreholes—up to 5 kilometers—and the limited ability to access them without disturbing the natural environment would result in a limited capability to adequately characterize the geologic environment at depth. Even more challenging would be to ensure that radioactivity cannot escape up the backfilled borehole.

Political innovations needed. All countries with commercial nuclear energy programs agree that geologic repositories are the only solution to the problem of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The problems facing repositories are not primarily technical (though these exist), but political. Political innovations are truly needed to successfully site these facilities.

Such innovations already exist: Finland is currently constructing its deep geologic repository, and Sweden isn’t far behind. Switzerland, France, and Canada have all made significant progress in the last few years. The United States, in fact, is the only country with an operating deep geologic repository—the Waste Isolation Pilot Project that houses transuranic waste from the nuclear weapons complex in southeastern New Mexico—proving that it can be done here.

There are important lessons to learn from the mistakes and successes of these other programs: The host community must accept the site by a large majority; the host community must be compensated; it must be allowed to veto the site, up to a predefined point in the process; the process works best when the host community is allowed to participate in site development and conduct its own independent research; the nuclear waste management organization and the nuclear regulator must be trusted institutions; and the waste management organization must have the ability to manage its own budget and plan for the long term.

None of this is rocket science, and these lessons have been spelled out numerous times in the United States. The real question is whether anyone with political power is listening.”

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 21 February 2020

The Toronto plant has never had an accident. And the nuclear safety commission said testing shows radiation levels in soil and air around the plant are not only far below allowable levels, but even lower than the radiation in our everyday lives, which comes from a variety of sources including the sun as well as the breakdown of radioactive minerals found naturally in rock and soil.

However, the application to renew the licence, which includes public hearings, is one of the first opportunities many residents will have to ask questions after finding out in 2012 from a Star story that the plant — owned by GE-Hitachi until December of 2016 — was making pellets.
Read more

The story was the result of activist Zach Ruiter, a freelance journalist and Trent University graduate, who knocked on doors to alert residents that the plant existed. Ruiter said he felt there was a lack of public awareness and not enough public consultation by the CNSC.
At that time, signs on buildings at the Toronto plant simply said the company’s name — there was no indication that it was a nuclear facility.

The CNSC required GE-Hitachi to have an outreach program, but most community members didn’t know what the plant manufactured despite its presence in the neighbourhood since 1965.

Now, nearly 250 individuals and organizations have registered to intervene either as speakers or in writing during hearings in March, when the commission will hold two-day public sessions in Toronto as well as Peterborough, where BWXT owns another former GE-Hitachi plant. The Peterborough plant consolidates the pellets into fuel bundles for Ontario Power Generation’s Pickering and Darlington nuclear generating stations.
The licence renewal, which CNSC staff have recommended be approved, is for both plants.

“From the CNSC staff perspective, there are no risks,” said Caroline Ducros, director of the safety commission’s nuclear processing facilities division. “The quantities (of uranium) that are leaving the (Toronto) plant are negligible.”

Despite the assurance, Muir said he didn’t feel confident after leaving the CNSC’s public information meeting.
There were a number of unanswered questions, he said, including what happens if the tank full of highly flammable liquid hydrogen — the pellets are baked in a furnace filled with hydrogen — catches fire? What’s the blast radius? Or the company’s emergency plan?

The company says it has an internal emergency response plan for both sites, with guidelines for emergency staff and plant personnel, which is sent to the CNSC.

And that “each BWXT facility has established emergency prevention programs to minimize the risk of fires and other hazardous events, as well as robust response plans that prescribe the actions to be taken to prevent or minimize potential health and environmental hazards,” wrote Natalie Cutler, BWXT’s director of communications and government relations, in an email.

Muir also wondered why, with such an increase in public interest, so few residents knew about the CNSC information meeting, where commission staff and experts, together with BWXT employees, anti-nuclear activists and politicians seemed to outnumber the 15 or so people from the community.

Kevin Lee, a senior regulatory policy officer at the CNSC, which employs 900 staff, said the commission couldn’t afford to notify the public by advertising in newspapers because it was too expensive. The organization relies on social media.

BWXT’s application is not only generating opposition in Toronto, but in Peterborough because of a provision in the new licence that would allow BWXT to move its Toronto pelleting operation anytime during its 10-year period to Peterborough.

Activists there say they are tired of dealing with the legacy waste from the GE-Hitachi plant, which used PCBs, asbestos as well as other chemicals at the Peterborough location, although in manufacturing operations that were unrelated to the nuclear fuel bundling division bought by BWXT.

At its height in the ’60s, the GE plant in Peterborough employed 6,000 people. But the numbers steadily decreased and in 2017 the company laid off 350 employees in its large motor division, where it made motors for cruise ship propellers or to pump oil, among other things. About 50 employees remained in engineering and sales.

“It’s just worrying because there’s alway accidents and fugitive emissions whenever there’s a factory,” said Jane Scott, who became aware of GE’s nuclear division in Peterborough about 10 years ago when her children were students at nearby Prince of Wales elementary school.

“I thought what the heck is a nuclear facility doing across from the school,” Scott said.

Scott co-founded Peterborough’s Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) in April of last year after hearing that BWXT might move the pelleting operation to Peterborough.

“Extreme events happen and people make mistakes, as BWXT has in the past. And GE before that,” Scott said. “So it’s just a no-brainer that this should not be in the heart of our downtown.”

Scott was referring to an incident at BWXT in Peterborough where two workers wore the wrong respirator filters 15 times over a two-year period, from 2015 to 2017, exposing them to airborne beryllium, a highly toxic metal used to join parts of fuel bundles together.

“These employees were assessed and have been returned to normal duties,” said Cutler in an email. “There was no off-site exposure or release of beryllium, and there was no health or safety risk posed to the public or environment.”

In Toronto, Julie Dzerowicz, MP for the Davenport riding, said she has consulted a number of people about the BWXT pelleting plant on Lansdowne and has not heard any information that makes her think it’s a danger.

Canadians typically receive a 1.8 millisievert dose a year of background radiation, which is found naturally in the air, soil, rocks, water, plants and food, according to the CNSC. We are exposed to higher doses when we have x-rays or diagnostic imaging.
The CNSC said the annual public dose from the Toronto plant in 2018 was 0.0004 millisieverts and that epidemiological studies show there are no adverse health effects for any dose below 100 millisieverts.
Dzerowicz said if anyone presents her with evidence that shows she should be concerned for the health and safety of Davenport residents, she “will take urgent and immediate action.”

However, Dzerowicz was adamant residents in her riding be allowed to ask their own questions and requested the CNSC hold hearings in her riding, as opposed to the original location — a hotel near the Yorkdale Shopping Centre where the commission planned to simulcast proceedings from a physical location in Peterborough.

The CNSC complied and the Toronto hearings on March 2 and 3 will be held at Casa do Alentejo at 1130 Dupont St., where Dzerowicz plans to speak as an intervener.

“I’d like to represent what I’ve been hearing from Davenport residents,” she said.

Those concerns include more transparency regarding test results of air and soil samples, more safety audits of the plant by the CNSC and information about the company’s emergency plan.

BWXT does in-stack air monitoring every day and according to the company’s website, the sample results are verified by an independent laboratory. At the perimeter of the plant, five monitoring stations draw air into a filter and the amount of uranium dioxide captured by the filter is analyzed by a third-party lab.

Soil sampling is done less often — once a year by BWXT and about once every two years by the CNSC — because there has been little change in the concentration of uranium over time, said BWXT president John MacQuarrie.

Wastewater used in the plant to clean floors, equipment and protective clothing is held in storage tanks and treated to remove as much uranium dioxide as possible before it is released into the city’s sewage system.

“We all get radiation in our daily lives. And what our plant contributes to that is insignificant,” MacQuarrie said. “And we operate well below what the regulators consider as safe … And so we’re quite confident, after many years of the business being operated, that it’s a highly safe operation.”

According to company reports, from 2014 to 2018 BWXT emitted 46.2 grams of uranium dioxide into the air and 3.6 kilograms into the city’s wastewater, levels that are far below the allowable air emissions of 760 grams and water emissions of 9,000 kilograms per year. (The charitable organization Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has entered a submission recommending, among things, that what it calls “absurdly high” annual release limits be reduced.)

Among the experts Dzerowicz consulted was Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, who is contributing to a submission by the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which is intervening at the hearings on behalf of CARN.

Edwards is a former professor of math and science at Montreal’s Vanier College and has done consulting in the past on nuclear issues for government and industry.

He said studies about the effects of exposure to uranium dioxide have been largely inconclusive, mainly because there are few populations that have been exposed to breathing in the powder.

But he said the BWXT plant in Toronto is giving off “a small but significant” amount of radioactive heavy metal powder into the air that if inhaled could go deep into lung tissue and radiate a cell so that over time it could develop into cancer. He said it could take 20 years for any negative effects to appear because uranium releases its radioactive particles very slowly.

“In the case of Peterborough, there is an elementary school right across the street. And the outdoor playground faces onto the BWXT company just across the street,” possibly exposing kids to the powder for years if the pelleting operation is moved there, he said.

“I’m not saying they’re all going to get cancer. They’re not,” Edwards said. “But some of them could very well get cancer. So it’s a life-threatening situation for those few individuals who might suffer the consequences.”
BWXT says emissions from the Toronto facility are about one per cent of the regulatory limit and do not cause any health impacts to the public or the environment.

A group of scientists who live near the Peterborough fuel-bundling plant are also worried about beryllium.
In a letter to the Examiner newspaper, they expressed concern that recent testing by the CNSC showed concentrations of beryllium in local soil samples had increased since 2014.

“The clear increase of Be in soil samples is likely being driven by significant increases in air concentrations, which is particularly worrying because beryllium can be toxic if inhaled,” reads the letter. “More worryingly, the highest values of beryllium in 2019 were found in the samples in the Prince of Wales school.

“Although none of these samples have reached the threshold at which intervention is mandated, the increase alone mandates intervention and further evaluation to ascertain the source.”

Answers to whether that will happen, as well as other questions, may have to wait until commission hearings in March.

A spokesperson for the CNSC said in an email that questions about where the escaping uranium dioxide goes, what the health effects are or details about the emergency plan will have to wait until then.

“Since the Commission is a quasi-judicial administrative tribunal and currently seized with the matter of BWXT licence renewal, the Commission and CNSC staff cannot further address your followup questions,” according to the email, “as these are about substantive issues that are expected to be dealt with in the context of the upcoming hearing.”

Meanwhile, BWXT says it has no immediate plans to consolidate pellet making and fuel bundling in Peterborough.

But Dzerowicz thinks the company will move the operation from her Toronto riding in the next five years.
“What I would say to you is that over time, and my preference is sooner than later, I would love to see the uranium pelleting out of the riding and out of the city to a different location,” said Dzerowicz, explaining that given land values, it’s only natural the plant would move out to allow more housing.

“I’m not suggesting they move to Peterborough,” Dzerowicz said. “I think it needs to be in a safe area.”

The NWMO site selection process has recently (late 2019) narrowed from 22 candidate sites (potential “willing host communities”) to 3 sites. One of the remaining three candidate sites is at Ignace, north of Lake Superior not far from the border between Ontario and Manitoba; the other two candidate sites are quite close to the Bruce Nuclear Power Station right beside Lake Huron. The process for finding a home for Canada’s HLW is still in its early stages even though it has been going on for decades — over 20 years under NWMO, and over 20 years before that under AECL, Ontario Power and the Seaborn Panel.

The following article has to do with another DGR project, completely different from the first. It is a separate facility proposed by Ontario Power Generations (OPG, a provincial crown corporation that owns all of Ontario’s nuclear power reactors). The OPG DGR is NOT intended for high level waste (HLW), but for storing Ontario’s low level radioactive waste (LLW) and intermediate level radioactive waste (ILW), from all of Ontario’s nuclear reactors — with the exception of “decommissioning waste”, for which there is at present no designated approach. The OPG DGR was intended for a precise selected site close to Lake Huron, not far from Kincardine Ontario, which is also in the vicinity of the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant.

The OPG DGR project — intended for Ontario’s Low and Intermediate Level Wastes (LILW) — was given a green light by an Environmental Review Panel that held public meetings on the matter, but the federal government has delayed giving its approval for various reasons — and that approval is necessary before the project can proceed. In recent months, the major remaining stumbling block has been the lack of explicit permission from the Saugueen Ojibway Nation (SON) on whose unceded territory the OPG DGR would be located. Ontario Power Generation has pledged repeatedly that the project will not proceed without the approval of SON, and the federal government has been awaiting word from the SON.

SON has now spoken. The answer is “No”. There will be no implementation of the OPG DGR project at the site beside Lake Huron that was selected for that purpose.

However, the OPG project for LILW has no direct bearing on the first DGR project for HLW that was described in the opening paragraph above. NWMO will continue to search for a willing host community to build a DGR to house all of Canada’s irradiated nuclear fuel, including two candidate sites in the same general neighbourhood as the OPG DGR project which has now been rejected.

The nuclear waste issue is nothing if not complicated! And the Age of Nuclear Waste is just beginning….”

For context, this statement was in response to this media article:

Title: Saugeen Ojibway Nation Votes No on DGR
Author: CNW Group
Date: 31 January 2020
Publication: Yahoo! Finance
Link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/saugeen-ojibway-nation-votes-no-031600205.html

It is alarming to hear the nearby residents in the article say nuclear is clean power – given the fact that no country on Earth has a feasible plan for the long-term storage of dangerous nuclear and radioactive waste products. Most of these products sit in storage facilities near to the reactors themselves.
Read more

Title: Our Aging Nuclear Power Plants
Author: Ari Natter
Date: 9 February 2020
Publication: Go Erie
Link: https://www.goerie.com/business/20200209/our-aging-nuclear-plants

Text:

Utilities nationwide are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s.

Bonnie Rippingille looked out at the wisps of steam curling from the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant across Biscayne Bay with a sense of dread. In December federal regulators approved Florida Power & Light Co.’s request to let the facility’s twin nuclear reactions remain in operation for another 20 years beyond the end of their current licenses. By that point they’ll be 80, making them the oldest reactors in operation anywhere in the world.

“That’s too old,” said Rippingille, a lawyer and retired Miami-Dade County judge. “They weren’t designed for this purpose.”

With backing from the Trump administration, utilities nationwide are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s as they run up against the end of their 60-year licenses.

“We are talking about running machines that were designed in the 1960s, constructed in the 1970s and have been operating under the most extreme radioactive and thermal conditions imaginable,” said Damon Moglen, an official with the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “There is no other country in the world that is thinking about operating reactors in the 60 to 80-year time frame.”

Indeed, the move comes as other nations shift away from atomic power over safety concerns, despite its appeal as a carbon-free alternative to coal and other fossil fuels. Japan, which used to get more than a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power, shut down all its plants in 2011 after a tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown at three reactors in Fukushima. Only a handful have restarted while others that can’t meet stringent new standards are slated to close permanently. Germany decided that year to shutter its entire fleet by 2022 and is now having trouble meeting its ambitious climate goals.

By contrast, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to decide this year on requests by subsidiaries of Exelon Corp. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at its Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania and Dominion Energy Inc. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at a power plant in Surry, Virginia.

Dominion has notified the commission it intends to ask permission to extend the life of two more reactors north of Richmond, Virginia. Duke Energy Corp. has said it plans to seek license extensions for its entire fleet of 11 nuclear reactors, starting with three in Seneca, South Carolina.

“There are economic benefits,” said Rounette Nader, Duke’s director of nuclear license renewal. “Continuing to operate our existing nuclear fleet is cheaper than replacing it.”

The nuclear industry has been buffeted by a wave of early reactor retirements in the face of competition from cheap natural gas and subsidized renewable power. Constructing a new nuclear plant – the only one being built in the U.S. is years behind schedule and over budget – can cost billions of dollars. Retrofitting an existing one is more likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.

“It just makes sense,” said Maria Korsnick, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade group that represents nuclear utilities. “I don’t think you should look at a plant just on calendar years, but rather the way that plant has been maintained, so many components have been replaced over the years. There is nothing magic about 80.”

Opponents such as Edward Lyman, a nuclear energy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, argue that older plants contain “structures that can’t be replaced or repaired,” including the garage-sized steel reactor vessels that contain tons of nuclear fuel and can grow brittle after years of being bombarded by radioactive neutrons. “They just get older and older,” he said. If the vessel gets brittle, it becomes vulnerable to cracking or even catastrophic failure.

Other concerns surround the durability of components such as concrete and electric cables, but an advisory board to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent government agency that gave Turkey Point the green light to operate into the 2050s, said those risks could be managed safely.

The commission’s decision doesn’t sit well with Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, a city of 13,000 on about 18 miles away from the Turkey Point plant. He keeps a store of potassium iodide, used to prevent thyroid cancer, large enough to provide for every child in his city should the need arise.

“You’ve got hurricanes, you’ve got storm surge, you’ve got increasing risks of hurricanes and storm surge,” said Stoddard, 62. All of this not only increases the likelihood of a nuclear disaster, it also complicates a potential evacuation, which could put even more lives at risk.

Gabriel Ignetti, a 72-year-old Miami resident and retired music teacher, views nuclear power as a lesser evil than climate change and welcomes extending the life of the plant. “We have a climate emergency,” he said, “and if you have a climate emergency you can’t say we are not going to use that tool.”

That’s a point backers also highlight to make the case for extending the lives of nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and about 55% of the nation’s carbon-free energy.

Climate change is also one of the main cases against extending the life of Turkey Point, said Kelly Cox, the general counsel for Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental group that is challenging the NRC’s approval in federal court. New data show sea level rise in the area reach as high as 4.5 feet by 2070, but regulators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn’t take those updated figures into account, Cox. said.

“They are going to be flooded,” Cox said. “If we are relicensing a major utility we need to be preparing for the impacts of sea level rise.”

Scott Burnell, a NRC spokesman, said the agency’s review process did take into account the most recent information available on sea level rise, but that “the projected rate of sea level rise and associated revisions in flood hazard are slow enough that the plants will have ample time to appropriately analyze and address possible future effects.”

Peter Robbins, a spokesman for Florida Power & Light Co. said the utility is addressing that problem using a series of pumps to decrease the salinity in the cooling canals. The main power plant and its critical component are elevated 20 feet above sea level and are protected by concrete and reinforced buildings designed to withstand hurricanes and floods.

“At the end of the day it’s a very clean, reliable source of electricity,” Robbins said. “More than anything we think this is a win for our customers. It helps keep their bills low, and there are no greenhouse gases as part of nuclear.”

In the city of Homestead, not far from the Turkey Point plant, Brian Goodwin, a 52-year-old farmer, said he supports the reactors’ extension. “I hope they build another one,” said Goodwin. “It’s good clean power.”

H-Canyon was constructed in the early 1950s and began operations in 1955.

The aging facility – 1,028 feet long, 122 feet wide and 71 feet tall – is the nation’s only up-and-running hardened nuclear chemical separations plant.

White last week described H-Canyon as an “extremely important facility to the United States” and as a “very precious resource.”

Wilson agreed, describing it as “just so critical for our country.”

The article goes on to discuss the plant needs repairs and upgrades, such as roof maintenance, and technology upgrades.
Link: https://www.aikenstandard.com/news/h-canyon-at-srs-poses-maintenance-challenge-doe-cleanup-chief/article_ecff0374-5f88-11e9-b58a-6b22c18d785d.html