=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #63
—February 8, 1988—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
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Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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PROBLEMS MOUNTING FOR NUCLEAR POWER, BUT ADVOCATES PRESS ON.
It was a bad week for nuclear power. Consider these facts:
The Public Service Company of New Hampshire, a publicly owned
electric utility with assets of $2.7 billion, declared bankruptcy
because of high costs of constructing the Seabrook nuclear power
plant. The $5.2 billion plant has never operated because state
and local governments in New Hampshire and Massachusetts refuse
to take part in devising emergency evacuation plans, a step
necessary for the facility to gain a commercial operating
license. Public Service of New Hampshire is the fourth largest
American corporation ever to declare bankruptcy. [NY TIMES
1/29/88, pgs. 1, D3.]
Nuclear power plants that were abandoned before completion, or
finished at excessive expense, will cost the American economy
$100 billion, according to a report in the NEW YORK TIMES.
Abandoned plants will cost $30 billion (not counting the Seabrook
plant, whose future is uncertain). The other $70 billion
represents the cost of operating nuclear plants versus the cost
of competing technologies, mainly coal.
During the past decade, 66 nuclear power plants were canceled;
thirty other plants were completed. Since 1978, no new nuclear
power plants have been ordered in the U.S. Nuclear power now
generates 17% of U.S. electricity. [NY TIMES Feb. 1, 1978, pgs.
D1, D9.]
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) “have quietly initiated a
study of cancer deaths among populations near nuclear power
plants,” because of recently discovered “leukemia clusters around
the Pilgrim power plant in Massachusetts and several plants in
the United Kingdom,” according to the NY TIMES Feb. 5, A11.
Findings of excessive leukemia [cancer of the blood-forming
cells] “have led us to initiate a large-scale evaluation of
cancer deaths occurring among persons living near the over 100
rectors operating in the United States,” said Dr. James
Wyngaarden, director of the NIH. The studies were not announced
publicly but were revealed in a letter to Senator Ted Kennedy
(D-Mass.).
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the agency charged with
setting rules for the nation’s nuclear plants and enforcing those
rules, came under criticism itself for failing to investigate
alleged misconduct by various nuclear plant operators. The NRC
set up an Office of Investigations in 1982 specifically to look
into allegations of wrongdoing, as distinct from actual technical
problems. Today the Office has a backlog of 127 open cases and
has had to drop 39 other cases because it could not get to them
in a timely fashion. Fifty of the open cases “are not being
worked on because of a lack of resources,” according to Ben B.
Hayes, director of the Office.
The matters supposedly under investigation are not trivial. For
example, former workers at the Farley nuclear plant in Dothan,
Alabama, told the NRC that plant managers repeatedly falsified
radiation readings, thus hiding evidence of problems that would
otherwise have caused an expensive safety shutdown. The charges
were made three years ago but the NRC’s Office of Investigations
is just now beginning to look into it and appears to be months,
or years, away from determining the veracity of the allegations.
A lawyer who for seven years handled prosecutions in the Justice
Department on behalf of the NRC and other agencies, recently
testified before Congress, saying “I know of no other regulatory
or investigative agency where senior agency officials have taken
as many bizarre and seemingly deliberate actions intended to
hamper the investigation and prosecution of individuals and
companies in the industry the agency regulates.” The lawyer,
Julian S. Greenspun, said, “The NRC will bend over backwards to
avoid finding problems.
The Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs reported on an
investigation by NRC officials of the Comanche Peak nuclear power
plant 85 miles southwest of Dallas, TX. The NRC’s own inspectors
found breakdowns in quality control, and engineering problems,
“but their superiors challenged them, suggesting that findings be
deleted or weakened, and some senior managers harassed and
intimidated field inspectors,” the TIMES reports. [NY TIMES Jan.
31, 1988, pg. 30.]
The nation’s first major underground nuclear waste repository,
which is supposed to start accepting military plutonium wastes
next October, has water leaking into it at a rate that some
scientists argue will make it unacceptable as a waste repository.
The waste dump is a huge underground cavern drilled into
rock-like salt formations 2150 feet below the desert in southern
New Mexico, at a cost of $700 million so far.
“How serious these [water] leaks are has enormous implications
for the nation’s nuclear industry, the Government’s nuclear
weapons program, and for New Mexico. Also at stake, scientists
and lawmakers agree, is the reputation of the [federal]
Department of Energy which has searched for a method of safely
disposing of radioactive wastes since the 1950s, when it was
known as the Atomic Energy Commission,” says the NEW YORK TIMES
[Feb. 1, 1988, pg. A18.].
Plutonium is lethally radioactive for 240,000 years. The
government is planning to put 13,466 pounds of pure plutonium-239
(mixed with other wastes) into the ground in New Mexico during
the next 30 years. According to scientists at the Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory, 100 micrograms of plutonium constitutes a
lethal dose for a human. Thus the nation’s first radioactive
waste site will hold 160 billion lethal doses of
radioactivity–by far the most dangerous dump ever constructed.
It was designed to remain bone dry. Now it is found to be
filling up with water. Water will corrode the canisters, turning
the radioactive waste into deadly soup. The tremendous weight of
earth above the waste will create great pressure. Future humans
trying to tap the natural gas and petroleum reserves already know
to exist beneath the site may penetrate the site with a drill
rig. The pressurized radioactive soup could gush to the surface,
releasing millions or billions of lethal doses of plutonium into
earth’s environment, geologist and geochemists at University of
New Mexico and elsewhere argue.
But who among us believes that, in the face of a $700 million
investment, and in the face of perhaps the largest embarrassment
ever suffered by a federal agency, that the government will be
persuaded by mere science that they are making what is perhaps
the biggest mistake humans have ever made?
A bad week indeed.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: nuclear power; radiation; nh; electricity;
seabrook; ma; siting; nih; disease; health; health statistics;
cancer; leukemia; death statistics; death; james wyngaarden;
kennedy; congress; nrc; investigations; ben hayes; farley nuclear
power plant; al; lawyers; julian greenspun; senate; comanche peak
nuclear power plant; military; landfilling; repositories;
plutonium; leaks; doe; laboratories; los alamos scientific
laboratory; los alamos;