Radioactive waste leaks: The single largest risk of radioactive waste leaks at the present time is at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4. The reactor building is severely damaged from the March 2011 hydrogen explosion and is at risk of collapse. If this were to happen, the many hundreds of irradiated nuclear fuel assemblies in the storage pool could erupt into a radioactive inferno. The radioactive releases would dwarf what has already escaped into the environment. It is worth noting, however, that U.S. high-level radioactive waste storage pools contain many times the amount of radioactive waste as at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4, and a high-level radioactive waste fire in the United States could unleash a catastrophe because just as in Japan the storage pools are not located within robust radiological containment structures.
There have been high-level radioactive waste leaks in the United States, too. The U.S. Department of Energy has revealed that six underground storage tanks containing high-level radioactive waste liquids and sludge are leaking up to 1,000 gallons per year close to the Columbia River bordering Washington and Oregon. The waste comes from military reprocessing and the U.S. Cold War nuclear arsenal. Hanford has a total of 177 tanks, containing 53 million gallons of liquid high-level radioactive waste. Of the 177, 149 are single shelled, meaning the waste is leaking directly into the environment. The remaining tanks are double shelled, yet these too have also started to leak. The Hanford site’s high-level radioactive waste must be transferred to new, state-of-the-art double-shelled tanks. Vitrification (solidification into glass logs) of the liquids and sludge must be carried out as a priority in order to stabilize the high-level radioactive waste for the longer term.
On the commercial side, the list of confirmed leaks of tritium and other hazardous radionuclides from high-level radioactive waste has grown at an alarming rate. The following storage pools have been documented to have leaked into soil, groundwater, and surface waters: Hatch, Georgia; Indian Point, New York; Palo Verde, Arizona; Salem, New Jersey; Brookhaven National Lab’s High Flux Beam Reactor, New York; BWX Technologies, Virginia; San Onofre, California; Seabrook, New Hampshire; and Watts Bar, Tennessee.
The NRC admits to additional leaks from high-level radioactive waste storage pools in the United States, but claims “leaked spent fuel pool water was contained within spent fuel pool leakage-collection systems.” These were at Crystal River, Florida; Davis-Besse, Ohio; Diablo Canyon, California; Duane Arnold, Iowa; and Hope Creek, New Jersey. Leaks were reported at Kewaunee, Wisconsin, but the NRC notes only “white boric acid deposits, possible boric acid, observed on the wall and ceiling of the waste drumming room adjacent to the spent fuel pool.”
Additional leaks into soil, groundwater, and surface waters have been reported at most operating reactors, according to Beyond Nuclear’s Paul Gunter in his 2010 report “Leak First, Fix Later.” Beyond Nuclear’s “Routine Radioactive Releases from U.S. Nuclear Power Plants” report shows how radioactivity emissions into air and water are a “permitted,” “regular” occurrence at every stage of the uranium fuel chain, including at atomic reactors. “Permissible” or “allowable” should not be confused with “safe,” as every exposure to radioactivity, no matter how low the dose, increases a person’s risk of developing cancer, and such risks accumulate over a lifetime. The NAS has confirmed this in multiple reports over decades.
False solutions to the radioactive waste dilemma abound. The only real solution to the problem of radioactive waste is to stop producing it in the first place. The block in Japan on restarting all reactors—other than the reactor at Oi in Fukui Prefecture—has meant that no radioactive waste has been generated there for some time now. In the United States, the permanent shutdowns at Kewaunee, Wisconsin; Crystal River, Florida; and San Onofre 2 and 3 in California, and the announced closure of Vermont Yankee by the end of 2014, mean that high-level radioactive waste will no longer be generated at any of these sites. These are the first reactor shutdowns in the United States in fifteen years and are a testament to the tireless activism of the antinuclear movement.
For the high-level radioactive waste that already exists, U.S. environmental groups have long called for hardened on-site storage (HOSS) as an interim measure to empty dangerous storage pools and to upgrade dry cask storage in order to fortify radioactive waste against possible attack and prevent its leakage for the long term. HOSS also aims to prevent unnecessary centralized interim storage risks, including reprocessing.
Meanwhile, the U.S. nuclear power industry is seeking to offload responsibility for high-level radioactive waste onto the American taxpayer. U.S. senators, such as Ron Wyden (D-OR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Angus King (I-ME)—as well as the Department of Energy and its Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future—are proposing “consolidated interim storage” by 2021, which would create an unprecedented number of risks in the form of trucks, trains, and barges carrying irradiated nuclear fuel through many states.
Under the Yucca Mountain dump plan, which the Obama administration has wisely canceled, the Department of Energy proposed barging 111 containers of high-level radioactive waste from the atomic reactor at Oyster Creek up the Jersey shore, past Staten Island, to Newark. Fifty-eight barges were to carry high-level radioactive waste down the Hudson River from Indian Point to Jersey City, passing close to Manhattan. Forty-two barges were to carry high-level radioactive waste from Connecticut through the Long Island Sound to New Haven.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico—already burdened by military radioactive waste contamination and dumping—are high on the list of proposed commercial irradiated nuclear fuel dumps. So too are Native American reservations, a blatant example of radioactive racism. The Dresden nuclear power plant, southwest of Chicago in Morris, Illinois, might also be a candidate as it already stores nearly three thousand tons of irradiated nuclear fuel at its three reactors and is immediately adjacent to General Electric–Hitachi Morris’s storage pool—a reprocessing facility that due to a major design flaw never operated.
If irradiated nuclear fuel is consolidated at the Savannah River Site, it would be that much easier to reprocess. So far, a broad and diverse coalition in the United States has fended off major efforts to revive reprocessing, citing nuclear weapons proliferation risks, environmental risks, and its exorbitant costs. Japanese researchers and activists, such as Masa Takubo and Dr. Tadahiro Katsuta, have also sought alternatives to reprocessing, such as employing dry cask storage.
The United States and Japan have Mark I and II reactors in common. Both are catastrophically flawed General Electric boiling-water reactor designs. As a cost-saving measure, the radiological containments are too small and too weak, as was plainly apparent at Fukushima Daiichi. Numerous people have long warned of its defects, including AEC safety officer Stephen Hanauer in 1972; the “GE Three” whistle-blowers Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard, and Dale G. Bridenbaugh in 1976; and Harold Denton, a top safety official at NRC, in 1986. Yet there are still twenty-three Mark I reactors operating in the United States, and eight similarly designed Mark II reactors. These must be shut down before they melt down, especially given the collusion in Japan between the government and the power industry, which was identified by the Japanese diet’s independent investigation as the root cause of the Fukushima disaster. A very similar collusion exists in the United States between the nuclear power industry, the NRC, and elected officials. Gene Stilp, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, resident and longtime nuclear watchdog, took part in an antinuclear protest in Michigan in 1999 with a banner that read, THREE MILE ISLAND, CHORNOBYL, WHERE NEXT? Of course, the answer to that was Fukushima.