Ray Shadis: NRC’s wishful thinking

Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Raymond Shadis, a technical adviser and trustee of the New England Coalition and the executive director of Friends of the Coast/Earth Day Commitment of Mid-Coast, Maine.

The story below appeared Aug. 26 and 27 in numerous national news outlets, but nowhere is it better summed than in Bob Audette’s incisive article in the Brattleboro Reformer of Aug. 27, linked here. (Please read it, then return to our comments).

In response, New England Coalition speaks to the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission waste rule’s long-term implications – a long-term (multi-generational, if not permanent) nuclear waste dump on the banks of the Connecticut.

In its new waste rule, NRC is talking about swapping out high level nuclear waste and storage containers every 100 years or so. This speaks volumes to anyone with an indigenous peoples’ “seventh generation” perspective. NRC’s risk calculations are fantasy in the present and in tomorrow miss the all-important genetic transmission, multiplication, reinforcement component. We are the first generation in human history to knowingly, purposefully hand off a negative genetic inheritance to future generations.

In the meanwhile NRC continues to study inadvertent criticality in spent fuel pools, the potential effects of crumbling neutron radiation absorbents in dry storage canisters, the failure of welds in stainless steel canisters in corrosive environments, and the degradation of concrete storage “over-packs” or casks after less than a decade of deployment in New England weather. To which we say, “If NRC were so damned sure, there would be little to study.”

NRC’s conclusions are apparently founded on wishful thinking and little else: NRC ignores the fact that while a nuclear waste cask accident can only involve a discrete, segregated amount of fuel stored in an individual canister and cask, a spent fuel pool can involve the entire mass of spent fuel in a storage pool; not 50 or 60 fuel bundles, but thousands. Nuclear fuel will have been separated from its mass in the Vermont Yankee pool to limited capacity hermetically-sealed, stainless steel canisters protected by heavy concrete over-packs, or “casks.” Thus, unlike the spent fuel in a single pool, there is no credible way that an accident can involve the full mass of fuel. Until the transfer is complete and the mass of fuel is divided and distributed into sealed and fortified containers, we cannot agree to Entergy’s proposed reduction in the scope and scale of emergency planning.

Clearly we do not credit the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s recent decision that all forms of waste fuel storage are equally safe.

We rely instead the conclusions of the 2000 “Technical Study of Spent Fuel Pool Accident Risk at Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants – NUREG-1738” wherein,

• The probabilities of a malevolent act (sabotage) cannot be determined [so must be treated as absolute], the probabilities of an accident are low; but the vulnerabilities are many and the potential consequences of an accident can be horrific.
• The study considers accident scenarios specific to Boiling Water Reactors, such as Vermont Yankee; for example, a loaded cask drop into, and through the bottom of, the spent fuel pool.
• The study considers spent fuel accident consequences in a preceding study at Millstone I, a shuttered Connecticut plant almost identical to Vermont Yankee; wherein tables in the study show the potential for a fuel cladding fire to result in many thousands of latent fatalities out to a distance of 500 miles.
• In the report, NRC staff opines that spent fuel pool cladding has the potential to enter rapid oxidation (catch fire), no matter how old it is.
• And finally, the study considers the seismic fragility of the VY spent fuel pool itself; concluding that in a very rare but extreme tremor, the pool could tear from corner-to-corner or the bottom of the VY spent fuel pool could drop out entirely.

Either the cask drop or structural failure of the spent fuel pool would expose fuel, that is, render it unshielded by either water or concrete structures, and thus, unlike Fukushima’s relatively intact pools, because of intense, unshielded radiation fields, be unapproachable by emergency coolant resupply vehicles out to a half mile and more.

Well, it’s not a pretty picture; and not nearly so pretty a picture as that painted by the highly politicized and industry-captured NRC. New England Coalition has tagged on to an ad hoc coalition of 34 federal intervenor groups and individuals who were instrumental in getting the federal court to order NRC to revisit its 2010 Waste Confidence Rule and in getting NRC to suspend all nuclear licensing for over a year while this new rule went through expedited processing at NRC. If the reader gets a peripheral image of three-way subterranean warfare between NRC, the nuclear industry, and citizen safety advocates, they would not be far amiss.

NEC is fighting every day to bring intelligence, compassion, and environmental stewardship to the nuclear arena in Vermont, across the region; and nationally, but NEC is swamped in debt left from Entergy Vermont Yankee’s five-year “Certificate of Public Good” case for extended operation (ironically rendered moot when Vermont’s Department of Public Service and Public Service Board accepted Entergy cash donations in lieu of a credible demonstration of good faith corporate citizenship from Entergy Corp.).

Given that many perceive the battle now over, while many more remain oblivious as to how and where the battle has actually taken place and is continuing, NEC struggles with public and political indifference while faced with the antagonism of the trillion-dollar world-wide nuclear industry.

In the end the assault by nuclear takes place one community and one beta particle versus one living cell, at a time.

In a few weeks, NEC celebrates its 43rd annual Members Meeting … tired, but oh so very proud. And we celebrate our friends, mentors, colleagues and allies on the regional and national scene just-to-mention-a-few: Seacoast Anti-Pollution League (New Hampshire), C-10 (Massachusetts), Pilgrim Watch (Massachusetts), Hudson Riverkeeper (New York), Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Southern Alliance For Safe Energy (Tennessee), Georgia WAND, NIRS, Beyond Nuclear, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, and a whole lot (too many to name) more.

Donations may be made at www.NECNP.org.