Month: August 2024

— Editorial: Ventura County officials must sue California to clean-up toxic Santa Susana Field Lab

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From Ojai Valley News, California

Larry Yee of Ojai is the former chair of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

OPINION: V.C. must sue to protect people from toxic Santa Susana Field Lab
By Larry Yee
July 17, 2024

Ninety percent or more of the toxic chemicals and radioactivity left! This is NO cleanup. It is unacceptable. Explain that to the parents of small children living nearby. … How many more children must develop cancers before our elected officials do something?’

Join campaign to clean up site of partial nuclear meltdown.

For over a year, the Ojai Valley News | Ventura County Sun has done an outstanding job of covering the travesty of the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL). In the spring Ojai Magazine article “Radioactive rain,”  reporter Kit Stolz writes in detail of the 1959 partial nuclear reactor meltdown that still haunts and poses danger to the people of Ventura County.

To mark the 65th anniversary of that disaster, local advocates and community organizations are engaged in a 10-day campaign that started with an Action Assembly on July 13 to demand local elected officials — in particular the Ventura County Board of Supervisors — take action and litigate like they have long resolved and promised to do.

SSFL was a Cold War-era testing facility for rocket engines and nuclear reactors. The thousands of tons of toxic chemicals that were used and dumped there, plus the radioactivity from at least four nuclear accidents, make the SSFL one of the most contaminated sites in the country.

Its 2,850 acres sit on a plateau just south of Simi Valley and west of Chatsworth with more than 700,000 people in surrounding communities living in harm’s way.

The state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is the agency responsible for enforcing the site’s decontamination and cleanup. Boeing, NASA and the Department of Energy are the responsible parties that were required by earlier consent orders to have the cleanup completed by 2017. But because of disputes, denials and delays, nothing was done and the mess remains.

Here we are 65 years later and SSFL has never been remediated, never been cleaned up, despite a long history of pleadings, protests, and petitions to the responsible parties, not to mention the ill effects to previous workers and nearby residents who have contracted cancer or other serious health problems. Currently, there are 80-plus children who have rare pediatric cancers.

DTSC should be ashamed and must be held accountable for allowing Boeing to skate on a full and complete cleanup of the Santa Susana Field Lab. To date, DTSC has proved to be ineffective and negligent in holding the polluters responsible.

Rather, in 2021, the agency conspired with Boeing behind closed doors and secretly developed a new plan.

Travesty

Here’s the travesty: The plan, called the Settlement Agreement, and its Environmental Impact Report (EIR), certified last year by DTSC, totally breaches the earlier Consent Order of 2007 that called for a full cleanup to background. If implemented, Boeing will be able to leave 90% or more of the contamination on site.

Ninety percent or more of the toxic chemicals and radioactivity left! This is NO cleanup. It is unacceptable. Explain that to the parents of small children living nearby.

In 2022, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution that declared it would sue the state (DTSC) if the final Environmental Impact Report did not support a full cleanup to background. The EIR didn’t come close and is woefully inadequate.

It’s been a year now and the supervisors have not acted. Why the delay? Why do they hesitate? How many more children must develop cancers before our elected officials do something?

I’ve lived in Ventura County for 38 years and am well aware of the divide between west and east county. While the Conejo Grade serves as a physical divide, we also are different culturally, demographically, and economically. Yet, we are all Ventura County residents and we share the same county governance system.

There are times, and this is one, when we all need to think of ourselves as neighbors, as one county, and act together in solidarity for our own shared interests. As the crow flies, Santa Susana is only 30 miles east of us. We breathe the same air, especially when the Santa Anas blow.

Citizens of the Ojai Valley, join with your neighbors in east county and demand the Board of Supervisors take action and litigate now.

Go to parentsagainstssfl.com/action-assembly for more information on what’s happening with our 10-day action campaign and learn how you can get involved to make a difference.

— Larry Yee of Ojai is the former chair of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

— Ontario officials paid to host nuclear waste repositories despite hazards; residents and First Nation tribes protest

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See Canadian Dimension article for details

From Rabble.com

Burying radioactive nuclear waste poses enormous risks
By David Suzuki
July 31, 2024

he spent fuel will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, and contamination and leaks are possible during storage, containment, transportation and burial.

As the consequences of burning dirty, climate-altering fossil fuels hit harder by the day, many are seizing on nuclear power as a “clean” energy alternative. But how clean is it?

Although it may not produce the emissions that burning fossil fuels does, nuclear power presents many other problems. Mining, processing and transporting uranium to fuel reactors creates toxic pollution and destroys ecosystems, and reactors increase risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and radioactive contamination. Disposing of the highly radioactive waste is also challenging.
http://large(dot)stanford(dot)edu/courses/2021/ph241/radzyminski2/

The people living in Ignace and South Bruce, Ontario, are learning about the potential dangers firsthand. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), a not-for-profit corporation representing nuclear power companies, has identified those communities as potential sites for disposing of six million bundles of highly radioactive waste in a “deep geological repository.” The federal government has agreed to the organization’s plans.

It’s an all-too-common story: environmentally damaging projects foisted on communities that need the money such projects promise.

In this case, the NWMO has already paid Indigenous and municipal governments large sums to accept its plans — ignoring communities that will also be affected along transportation routes or downstream of burial sites.

According to Canadian Dimension, industry expects to ship the wastes “in two to three trucks per day for fifty years, in one of three potential containers.” None of the three containment methods has been subjected to rigorous testing.

Even without an accident, trucking the wastes will emit low levels of radiation, which industry claims will produce “acceptable” exposure. Transferring it from the facility to truck and then to repository also poses major risks.

Although industry claims storing high-level radioactive waste in deep geological repositories is safe, no such facility has been approved anywhere in the world, despite many years of industry effort.

Canadian Dimension says, “a growing number of First Nations have passed resolutions or issued statements opposing the transportation and/or disposal of nuclear waste in northwestern Ontario, including Lac Seul First Nation, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen, Grassy Narrows First Nation, Fort William First Nation, and Wabaseemoong Independent Nations.”

Five First Nations — including Grassy Narrows, which is still suffering from industrial mercury contamination after more than 60 years — have formed the First Nations Land Alliance, which wrote to the NWMO, stating,

“Our Nations have not been consulted, we have not given our consent, and we stand together in saying ‘no’ to the proposed nuclear waste storage site near Ignace.”

Groups such as We the Nuclear Free North are also campaigning against the plan.

All have good reason to be worried. As Canadian Dimension reports, “All of Canada’s commercial reactors are the CANDU design, where 18 months in the reactor core turns simple uranium into an extremely complex and highly radioactive mix of over 200 different radioactive ingredients. Twenty seconds exposure to a single fuel bundle would be lethal.”

The spent fuel will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, and contamination and leaks are possible during storage, containment, transportation and burial. Industry, with its usual “out of sight, out of mind” approach, has no valid way to monitor the radioactive materials once they’re buried.

With 3.3 million bundles of spent fuels already waiting in wet or dry storage at power plants in Ontario, New Brunswick, Quebec and Manitoba, and many more to come, industry is desperate to find a place to put it all.

Even with the many risks and no site yet chosen for burial, industry and governments are looking to expand nuclear power, not just with conventional power plants but also with “small modular reactors,” meaning they could be spread more widely throughout the country.

Nuclear power is enormously expensive and projects always exceed budgets. It also takes a long time to build and put a reactor into operation. Disposing of the radioactive wastes creates numerous risks. Energy from wind, solar and geothermal with energy storage costs far less, with prices dropping every day, and comes with far fewer risks.

Industry must find ways to deal with the waste it’s already created, but it’s time to move away from nuclear and fossil fuels. As David Suzuki Foundation research confirms, renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar is a far more practical, affordable and cleaner choice.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at davidsuzuki.org.

https://rabble.ca/environment/burying-radioactive-nuclear-waste-poses-enormous-risks/