Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Apparently it’s not enough that we have tons of made-in-the-USA nuclear waste languishing in leaky tanks and unlined landfills, awaiting safe burial even as it contaminates our precious aquifers. In fact, radioactive byproducts from the manufacture of American nuclear weapons could fill the Yucca Mountain repository before it’s even built.

But now the Utah-based EnergySolutions wants to import hazardous waste from a dismantled Italian reactor and bury 1,600 tons of it in the Tooele County landfill 80 miles west of Salt Lake City. That’s not amoré: nearly 1,000 objections to the plan have been filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and there’s still time to weigh in – the comment period ends June 10.

In the meantime, a bill that would prohibit the importation of radioactive waste from foreign countries has been introduced in congress, co-sponsored by Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah). ‘Scusami, but you see, we don’t want your scorie radioattive!

Sarah Gilman

Assistant Editor

Back when the feds saw the West (and, by extension, its residents) as disposable, they detonated four massive nuclear bombs thousands of feet below the sage scrub hills of western Colorado in hopes of freeing trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The first explosion, which took place near Rulison in 1969, was ruled a failure because (surprise surprise) it made the gas dangerously radioactive. Even so, the US Department of Energy went ahead and blew up three more bombs below the gas-rich Piceance Basin in 1973.

That sort of cavalier attitude drew fire from Manhattan Project scientist John Gofman, who called members of the nuclear establishment “the scoundrels of the Earth,” and noted that he “wouldn’t believe anything written by the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy.”

But these days, the energy department is a touch more leery of the Rulison bomb site. (Read on …)

Ernie Atencio

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is proposing something called “Complex Transformation” at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. Some agency bureaucrat must have come up with that benign and diversionary term to downplay the terrible thing our government is planning.

The plan is to increase production of plutonium pits, the triggers for nuclear weapons. The first pit was made at Los Alamos in 1945 and detonated at White Sands. The second pit destroyed Nagasaki and 74,000 of it’s inhabitants. Now NNSA wants to produce 50-80 pits per year.

Los Alamos produced and stockpiled thousands of pits until 1952, when the Hanford site in Washington state then the environmental disaster called Rocky Flats in Colorado took over. After Rocky Flats shut down and as Cold War mania faded in the 1990s Los Alamos took it up again at a rate of 20 pits per year.

The U.S. already has about 23,000 pits — 10,000 in weapons and 13,000 in an Amarillo, Tex. storage facility. The 2002 Moscow Treaty requires that deployed nuclear weapons be reduced to 2,200 by 2013. That the math doesn’t add up is only part of the problem.

(Read on …)

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

Thirteen million dollars later, research by the Department of Energy — intended to supercede Yucca Mountain data tainted by an email scandal three years ago — is, well, no good.

According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent panel of scientists reporting to Congress, concluded in a 30-page report that “a water infiltration model by DOE and Sandia National Labs did not consider all available data, was not calibrated with other site information and did not consider likely significant evaporation.”

The Yucca Mountain Project is a proposed repository for more than 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste, located 100 northwest of Las Vegas.

Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said “it is obvious” DOE tried to “shortcut” research in order to stay on schedule.

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

According to a copyrighted story by Michael Coleman in the Albuquerque Journal:

Navajo President Joe Shirley, backed by Reps. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Rick Renzi (R-AZ) is pressing the U.S. government to halt any new mining on or near the Navajo reservation.

Among the proposed extraction projects is a uranium mine at Crownpoint which abuts Navajo land where there is an aquifer supplying drinking water for thousands of people.

Four million tons of uranium were mined on the Navajo reservation between 1944 and 1986, and Shirley said there are “open scars on the ground leaking radioactive waste” from improperly closed mines, still posing health problems for Navajo families living nearby.

“Shouldn’t we clean up first before we start getting into new areas?” Udall asked. He said it was unclear whether a moratorium would require an act of Congress or an order from the Bush administration.

Navajo tribal members filed a petition in the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver in February, seeking to block Hydro Resources Inc. from injecting chemicals into the ground to release uranium in a process called in situ leaching. The Navajo petition asks the court to reverse Nuclear Regulatory Commission orders allowing the mines.

Uranium prices are soaring in response to increased demand for nuclear fuel for U.S. nuclear submarines and proposed nuclear power plants.

The Navajo Nation banned uranium mining and processing on its land in 2005. See Laura Paskus’ HCN story on the ban, and another story on Navajo mine workers’ health concerns.

Marty Durlin

Online Editor

The Associated Press reports that the state of Nevada has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ban Sandia National Laboratories from working on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project.

The state claims that one of Sandia’s managers, Geoff Freeze, indicated in a memo that meeting a deadline for paperwork was more important than ensuring that the facility will keep nuclear waste safe for at least ten thousand years.

If a June 2008 deadline for the application to the Department of Energy isn’t met, “we are all out of a job,” Freeze wrote, according to a copy of the memo obtained by Nevada. He also noted “three priorities – schedule, defensibility, credibility – in that order” must be satisfied. “Any slips in schedule must be recovered by cutting scope. There is no allowance for not meeting schedule.”

In the state’s petition to the NRC, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto retorted, “Common sense and experience teach that a plan which puts schedule ahead of defensibility and defensibility ahead of genuine scientific credibility is a recipe for disaster.”
(Read on …)