|
by Brian Edwards-Tiekert |
Take a drive down route 9 sometime. Pick it up behind Main Street, follow it south, and in five minutes' time the Middletown sprawl fades into unbroken lines of trees. This is Haddam, the Connecticut countryside. This time of year, the rolling hills are carpeted with fallen leaves. The smell of woodsmoke hangs heavy in the crisp air. There's a century-old opera house on the east bank of the Connecticut River. Less than a mile downstream is the scenic Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant.
Never heard of it?
Less than 9 miles from campus, CY is one of the oldest, most dangerous reactors in the country. Recent investigation of the plant has uncovered design flaws, misinstalled parts, and deteriorated safety components that had not been replaced. Some crucial safety equipment hadn't been operable since the day the plant opened. Makes you wonder what they're thinking.
Northeast Utilities (NU) is the operator of the CY plant. On three separate occasions, the company's been fined $100,000 for harassing employees who pushed safety concerns. The attitude toward safety problems is this: don't even report it until you can come up with a cheap way to fix it. Needless to say, many problems never get fixed or reported.
Northeast Utilities also operates the three Millstone reactors in Connecticut, all of which are closed right now because of safety problems. At Millstone 3, NU substituted a fast-drying concrete for the standard Portland cement to save time building the plant; now the foundation is eroding away from under the reactor. At Millstone 2, in what was supposed to be a contained environment, they discovered a hole the size of a "doggie door" in a wall near the fuel pool. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission mandates a 250-hour cooling period for burnt atomic fuel before refueling can take place. At Millstone 1, the company cut costs by reducing this to 60 hours, releasing radioactive contaminants into the air and endangering workers-at one time the work environment was so hot that workers' rubber shoes melted.
According to Public Citizen's Nuclear Lemon report the Haddam reactor is the worst in the country in the category of 'significant events,' potentially disastrous accidents. Last August a series of human mistakes and the failure of an emergency coolant pump brought the reactor within 52 minutes of a Three Mile Island-scale accident. Last November, two workers were badly contaminated while doing work in a transfer canal: no-one had informed them of the high levels of contamination in the tunnel, no-one had briefed them on proper procedure for minimizing exposure; they didn't even wear breathing masks. Since its inception, the plant has been releasing ten times as much Tritium (a radioactive carcinogen) into the Connecticut River as any other plant in operation releases, including plants twice its size. This September, state officials discovered that two fuel leaks during the plant's operation had contaminated the surrounding land as far out as a shooting range a mile away; CT Yankee didn't stop running the reactor until months after it discovered the second leak.
For years, the Connecticut Yankee plant was considered one of the nuclear industry's better performers because it had a life-time generating capacity of 75%. When these safety violations came to light, it became clear that the plant's high output was not a sign of success, but rather of the company's ability to conceal safety risks and a complete disregard for the risks of pushing an unsafe reactor. After operations halted for safety reasons last year, Northeast Utilities determined that it would be cheaper to decommission the plant now than to bring it up to code and continue to run it. Now, ten years before its license expires, the Connecticut Yankee Reactor is being shut down for good.
The same operators who mismanaged the plant in the past will be dismantling it now; the utility notorious for violating safety codes and then lying about it will be in charge of the operation. Local citizen's groups question the competence of the operators and the possibility of an accident during the dismantling of the plant that could release contamination and expose workers.
More importantly, the early decommissioning of the Connecticut Yankee plant raises issues confronting the nuclear industry at large. This is the beginning of the end of our country's first generation of nuclear reactors. Twenty-four other reactors face premature shutdown in the next seven years. Some of them will close because of parts that deteriorated much faster than the designers anticipated-at the now-retired Yankee Rowe reactor in Massachusetts, prolonged exposure to heavy radiation had made the reactor vessel extremely brittle and unsafe. Deregulation of the power industry and increased competition will force utilities to close many of their reactors because of the high cost of operation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved two programs for decommissioning plants, SAFSTORE and DECON. Under SAFSTORE operators close the plant and the radioactive equipment within it decays naturally over for 30 years or more. Over those 30 years, the radioactivity in the plant dwindles to a tenth of its original level, and the plant can be decommissioned more safely. DECON is the quick-and-dirty approach: the utility removes all equipment from the plant immediately, packages it, and ships it to a low-level radioactive waste dump.
Environmentalists and activist groups like Reactor Watchdog and the Citizen's Awareness Network promote SAFSTORE because it sharply reduces the risk of worker exposure during the dismantling process and public exposure from shipments of the radioactive waste traveling down our highways. Nuclear power companies tend to favor DECON for financial reasons. As soon as the company dismantles and removes the plant, the property taxes on the land are sharply reduced. What's more, as soon as the radioactive waste is shipped off-site, the utility is no longer responsible (or liable)-it becomes the taxpayer's responsibility. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), is doing everything it can to help plants push through hasty, unsafe decommissionings.
Historically, the NRC and the nuclear power industry have been pretty cozy. A decade-old directive on 'enforcement discretion' lets the NRC selectively neglect safety issues at plants to save costs. The Commission typically turns a blind eye toward safety violations until a third party, be it state officials, local activists, or whistleblowers, forces it to enforce its own standards. The NRC relies on plant operators to provide much of the information it needs to evaluate safety and performance.Funded entirely by fees that the plants and utilities pay, the NRC is actually dependent on the industry for its own survival. What's more, many officials just happen to find lucrative employment in the nuclear industry after they leave the NRC.
Five years ago Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts shut down because local organizing efforts revealed severe age-related dangers at the plant. Having been in operation for 30 years, it was the country's oldest commercial reactor. At the time the NRC had to see and approve a decommissioning plan before major dismantlement could take place. When the reactor ceased operation, it announced its intention to remain in SAFESTOR while it developed such a plan. That year, the NRC changed its rule to allow Yankee Rowe to strip the reactor before any decommissioning plan was approved. Ninety percent of the radioactive material in the plant was removed without any approved plan.
The Citizen's Awareness Network (CAN) took the NRC to court because it had rejected CAN's request for a public hearing before the decommissioning. The NRC's own rules mandated such a hearing. The court decision found the NRC to be "arbitrary, capricious, and utterly irrational." A bit late perhaps, but gratifying.
Since then the NRC has changed its rules to deregulate decommissioning, cut the NRC's degree of oversight, and to eliminate the public hearing requirement. CAN is challenging the new rules on constitutional grounds. Meanwhile, Connecticut Yankee will the first plant to be decommissioned under the new rules. As the plant proceeds with plans for immediate dismantlement, what happens will set a precedent for the decommissioning of all reactors in the near future.
On October 27, the NRC held a poorly publicized public meeting to discuss decommissioning activities at the Connecticut Yankee Plant. About 30 people from the community and nearby areas sat in the back of the fluorescent-lit high school auditorium. Northeast Utilities flew in about 20 officials and experts in dark suits who had been coached on how to field questions. So did the NRC. They sat together at the front of the room and addressed one another on a first-name basis. They put on a 2-hour presentation that nobody in the room understood, and then took turns answering questions from workers, activists, and community-members.
There were two ways they responded to difficult questions: by avoiding the question and talking about something else, and by burying their replies in enough technical jargon to make whoever asked the question feel to stupid to follow it up.
"Which decommissioning method is safer for workers?" asked a large mustachioed activist.
"Well," came the reply. "You can rest assured that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has established a limit as to how many rems a nuclear worker can be exposed to in one year." The light glared off his glasses, hiding his eyes. "And during the dismantling procedure, we're planning on being well below that limit." In other words: 'we haven't planned on breaking the law or having any accidents, so don't worry, they'll be safe.'
The aging of our nuclear reactors brings to light a larger problem: how do we dispose of the nuclear waste from these reactors? The dismantling of each old reactor produces tens of thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste-everything from the reactor vessel to its concrete foundation is contaminated with radioactivity by the time a plant shuts down. Currently, this waste is disposed of in landfills even though it is impossible to build a landfill that won't leak eventually. Three of our country's 6 radioactive landfills have been closed because of leakage resulting in severe environmental contamination. The landfill in Barnwell, SC, where waste from the Connecticut Yankee plant will be shipped, is leaking radioactive material that's contaminated the groundwater and continues to migrate off-site into the town's aquifers.
The situation is even worse for high level. To date, our reactors have produced 30,000 tons of high-level waste; it is predicted that the current generation of reactors will produce 85,000 more. This waste is so hot that the radioactivity would kill you in less than 3 minutes if you stood a meter away. It will be dangerous for the next 240,000 years. And, so far, we haven't been able to approve a site to dispose of it.
For years now, the industry's been pressuring the government to approve a storage site in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, on Shoshone land. The plan is to seal casks of high-level waste in the mountain. There are numerous concerns over seismic activity in the area, the ground-water level, and the percolation of rainwater through the mountain. An earthquake could raise the groundwater level up to the storage chamber: if plutonium in the spent fuel were exposed to the groundwater, it could trigger an explosion releasing massive amounts of radioactivity. The site will never meet current standards for a high-level waste facility.
The nuclear industry's response? Lower standards.
Senate Bill s-104 (and its counterpart in the House, HR 1270) provides for thousands of shipments of high-level waste from reactor sites across the country to the site in Nevada. They would be placed in an interim storage facility (something akin to a parking lot with a fence around it) on the plain in front of Yucca Mountain while the permanent facility was built. To get the site approved, the bills pre-empt standards for the permanent storage of high-level waste.
As soon as the government approves a high-level storage site, utilities cease to be responsible for the nuclear waste they've produced. Once moved from storage pools at reactors across the country, the spent fuel becomes an enormous taxpayer liability.
The flood of waste being transported across the nation would pose a huge health and safety risk to the public at large. High level waste would be shipped along our highways in barbell-shaped casks containing 20 times the radioactivity released by the Hiroshima bomb. Railway shipments would be 10 times larger. Over the next 30 years, 100,000 of these shipments would pass through 43 states on their way to Yucca mountain. Thirteen hundred highway shipments would pass through Connecticut alone. The Department of Energy's records on highway and railway accident rates indicate that we can expect 210-354 accidents involving these shipments.
How bad is an accident? In some scenarios the casks wouldn't even be breached. Others could have the effect of a mobile Chernobyl. A DOE report warns that a scenario involving a high speed impact, long duration fire, and fuel oxidation would contaminate a 42 square mile area, require 462 days to clean up, and cost taxpayers $620 million.
Opponents of the bill support dry-cask storage of the waste on the reactor sites. Many claim that 'disposal' of the waste will never be a viable option, that this is not a problem we can simply toss away. Good for up to a hundred years, the casks would let the spent fuel be contained and monitored at the utilities' expense, buying us time to come up with better storage options. Over that time, the waste would naturally become less radioactive and easier to handle.
The nuclear industry has pumped $13 million dollars of campaign contributions into congress since the bill was introduced. This summer S-104 passed the senate with 64 votes. The House of Representatives has yet to vote on HR 1270, but President Clinton has promised a veto if it passes (as it most likely will). Opponents to the bill in the Senate have only a two-vote margin protecting the one-third minority they need to support a veto.
"Out of sight, out of mind" has been the motto of our approach to nuclear waste. 50 years of living in a 'disposable' culture has left us thinking that we can just throw away our problems and forget about them. The problem is that there is no safe way to dispose of radioactive waste: it's too long-lived, unstable, and dangerous. Every radioactive dump site is an accident waiting to happen; the question is not if, but when something will go wrong. And if we just bury our nuclear waste to get rid of it, we'll have a hell of a time getting at it when there is a problem.
"Ignore it, and it'll disappear" is an attitude that seemed to characterize Northeast Utilities' approach to safety problems at the Connecticut Yankee plant. It's an attitude that we're to inclined to fall back on when we confront a problem as immense and terrifying as that posed by the nuclear industry. If we're not careful, that attitude could open Yucca Mountain to the dumping of high-level radioactive waste, and have a major impact on the next 240,000 years of human history.
Small grassroots citizen's action groups like CAN have made the first inroads into changing this attitude in the industry, and have proven that 'little' people can make a big difference. By focusing public attention on safety issues, they've been instrumental in the early closing of two plants. By exposing the NRC's gross negligence of its duties, they've forced it to become more aggressive in policing utilities.
If you want to help out, or if you want to learn more, you can contact them: Citizen's Awareness Network, Box 83, Shelburne Falls, MA 01370, 54 Old Turnpike Road, Haddam CT 06438 T/F: (413) 339-8768/4374/ (860) 345-8431 can@shaysnet.com, www.shaysnet.com/~can