Hanford nuclear reservation takes next step on waste cleanup

By Scott Learn, The Oregonian
September 28, 2009, 12:58PM

RICHLAND, Wash. - Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation have removed a 1.2 million gallon basin that once held 1,100 tons of spent uranium fuel roads, the U.S. Department of Energy says, and are beginning to clean up contaminated soil underneath the basin.

Contractor CH2M Hill's Plateau Remediation Company started excavating the contaminated soil on Sunday, meeting a deadline under DOE's agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Washington.

Earlier this month, workers finished years of work removing the K East Basin that once stored highly radioactive materials underwater, one of the greatest hazards at the former plutonium production site.

The basin held spent nuclear fuel from Hanford's nine reactors beneath 20 feet of water for shielding. Soil underneath the concrete basin was contaminated by leaks in the 1970s and 1990s, DOE says.

From October 2008 to early September, workers filled more than 2,000 large containers with low-level radioactive waste from inside the basin. It was disposed of in a lined landfill on site.

Cleanup of contaminated soil under the basin could be completed as early as next spring, DOE officials said, depending on the type of contamination found and the extent of its spread.

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2009/09/hanford_nuclear_reservation_ta.html

Radioactive Exposure Tour 2009

Radioactive Exposure Tour 2009 – A Reflection

Ania Anderst

As a student living in Perth, I found myself remarkably lucky to have made it out to the South Australian desert for ten days in May on the Friends of the Earth Radioactive Exposure Tour.

The 'radtour' is a unique experience allowing people interested in learning about the nuclear industry to go out on country to see uranium mines and to meet people directly affected by the nuclear industry past and present.

Tackling the nuclear industry can be an overwhelming experience, mostly because there is no end to the amount of information on the issue; from uranium mining, nuclear reactors, waste issues, to nuclear proliferation, it's easy to get lost in the information. And there's also the added factor of the multi-million dollar mining companies we're fighting, not to mention the governments siding with them.

The big picture can be rather scary, but actually stepping out onto uranium mines, onto country, and making connections with people who have for years been directly affected by these mining operations makes it easier to understand. It's no longer some abstract mine in some landscape you can't imagine, affecting some people you've never met before; these are real people with the real deal on their doorstep.

That abstract image of a mine in the back of your head becomes the physical site of the ugly and protruding Olympic Dam uranium/copper mine, or the hundreds of white pipes sticking out of the ground at Beverley uranium mine where they practice in-situ leach uranium mining. Those people become real when you hear the stories of Arabunna Elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, Maralinga veteran Avon Hudson and Adnyamathanha custodian Jillian Marsh. Their personal stories, dating decades back, make the issues more human, more accessible.

There's no better way than to see it yourself – and not only tour the mines and ask the workers questions, but then to juxtapose that intense, sometimes hostile experience with the peaceful time shared around the campfire with people who share your passions and willingness to fight the machine.

When BHP Billiton took us on a tour of Olympic Dam - which takes 35 million litres of water daily from the Great Artesian Basin for free - it was hard to believe some of the things they had to say. According to the BHP employee giving the tour, the mine had less of an environmental impact than pastoralism would have, and the nuclear industry was alleviating people from poverty by providing poor countries with power. It was difficult not to get hostile and emotional hearing that somewhat bent rationale for the existence of such an unsound industry. There was an answer to every one of our questions and the tour bus was filled with suffocating negative energy, lie after lie.

For me, Heathgate Resources' Beverley mine was even harder to stomach because of the propaganda which included giant placards covering an entire wall concerning their ongoing relationship with Aboriginal communities in the area and showing pictures of Aboriginal kids smiling. When in fact, in May 2000, local Aboriginal communities were at the gates of Beverley protesting and were subsequently put in a shipment container and capsicum sprayed by the SA police. An 11-year-old local Adnyamathanha girl was capsicum sprayed.

BHP Billiton really seemed to believe what they were saying, they were proud of what they were doing. In comparison, the PR chump at Heathgate Resources was a blundering boy behind a company t-shirt. He didn't answer questions properly, referring mostly to reports he hadn't seemed to have read, and it felt like he had something to hide. When asked about the shipping container episode, he refused to comment.

Both companies claimed to have excellent relations with Aboriginal communities, but after listening to Jillian and Uncle Kevin talk, it seemed more like mining companies were deliberately creating an ongoing war of attrition amongst Aboriginal communities who are not consulted properly, and are instead split over whether to take a mining company's money. If resources are needed in a remote community, people living there shouldn't have to have a uranium mine (or a waste dump for that matter) in order to have health care and infrastructure. These are basic human rights and Aboriginal communities shouldn't have to settle on corporate sponsorship and give up land rights for health and housing.

Coming face to face with these issues on country was confronting but the land itself allowed some peace of mind. Being out there, seeing the landscape and setting foot on red earth or on Lake Eyre, I had the strong sense that this country was alive. It surprised me how alive it was, with it's gentle and soft sands, yet rough, hard, contrasts in colour.

Every night we camped somewhere different, and by the end it felt like we'd been all over the state of South Australia - Woomera, Roxby Downs, Lake Eyre, Copley for coffee and quandong pie (more than once thanks to a trailer tyre which caught on fire), Marree, a bit of a crazed dip into the hot springs at Coward Springs, the Blanche Cup and Bubbler Mound Springs with Uncle Kevin, the Beverley uranium mine, Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary, the ochre cliffs near Lyndhurst, Brachina Gorge, the surrounding Gammon Ranges, Port Pirie ...

Aside from the heavy nature of what we were doing, life on tour was a lot of fun. As a group of 40 people with a range of ages, levels of experience, and approaches to the issue, it was what some called a social experiment. It was particularly lovely having a few children on the tour to emphasise the importance of the issues. Each night a different group helped set up dinner and campfires, and slowly the swags would surround the fires and the stars would come out at full capacity. Music was around all the time, singing tunes on the bus, off the bus, while the bus was bogged, while tyres were flat, while the bus wouldn't start, while faffing ...


And while we were out in the desert it was interesting to see the newspapers filling with related stories; with BHP announcing its proposal to the federal government for a uranium mine at Yeelirrie in WA, followed by the nuclear bomb test in North Korea. While North Korea gets a slap on the wrists from the UN, BHP in WA gets a tidal wave of anti-nuclear groups on it's ass. This spells out to me that it's better to stop them before the mines get going, because the safeguards against nuclear proliferation aren't safe, and while they're not we shouldn't be touching uranium (amongst other reasons to leave it in the ground).

Seeing such amazing country, meeting so many beautiful people and seeing the mines for what they are was an inspiring experience, and thanks to this opportunity I feel a lot more equipped to do whatever I can to make sure uranium stays where it belongs – in the ground.

[If you'd like to register interest in coming on the April-May 2010 radtour, contact 0417 318368.]

Radioactive Exposure Tour 2009


By Kasey Sparks and Steve Holdsworth

Friends of the Earth is hosting the annual Radioactive Exposure Tour from May 15-25. Since the 1980s, these tours have exposed thousands of people first-hand to the realities of 'radioactive racism' and to the environmental impacts of the nuclear industry.

After travelling from Melbourne to Adelaide then heading north to the SA desert, we'll visit BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs, the largest uranium deposit in the world. Friends of the Earth is currently working on a campaign to have the SA Roxby Downs Indenture Act repealed. This legislation allows the mine to operate with wide-ranging exemptions from the Aboriginal Heritage Protection Act, the Environment Protection Act, the Natural Resources Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

We'll watch sunset over Lake Eyre and see the Mound Springs - oases which are fed by the underlying Great Artesian Basin and host unique flora and fauna. Sadly, some of the Mound Springs have been adversely effected or destroyed altogether by the massive water take for the Olympic Dam mine - 35 million litres daily. The water is taken from Arabunna land and we'll spend time with Arabunna elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, President of the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance.

Indigenous people across the world suffer most directly from the impacts of the nuclear industry and this 'radioactive racism' is a major focus of the tour. The tactics used by uranium mining companies against Aboriginal communities include: ignoring the concerns of Traditional Owners; divide-and-rule tactics; bribery; 'humbugging' Traditional Owners (exerting persistent, unwanted pressure); providing Traditional Owners with false or misleading information; and threats, most commonly legal threats. We'll hear about the notorious incident concerning the laying of a water pipeline on Arabunna land in the mid-1990s. WMC Resources, the company that operated the mine at the time, used divide-and-rule tactics against Traditional Owners, leading to violence, terrorism, imprisonment, and the death of one person.

We'll hear first-hand accounts of the British nuclear bomb tests from Maralinga veteran and whistle-blower Avon Hudson. We'll learn about ongoing WMD proliferation risks arising from the uranium mining and export industry. Australia's uranium exports have resulted in the production of over 114 tonnes of plutonium — enough to build over 11,000 nuclear weapons. Successive Australian governments have been willing to sell uranium to nuclear weapons states, states refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, states blocking progress on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, states with a history of secret nuclear weapons research, and states stockpiling 'civil' plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguards system attempts to prevent 'civil' nuclear materials and facilities being used for WMD production, yet the Director General of the IAEA has acknowledged "vulnerabilities" in its "fairly limited" safeguards system and complained about the "half hearted" efforts to tighten the system.

After stopping for a swim at Coward Springs, we'll head east and camp in the beautiful Gammon Ranges and visit the not-so-beautiful Beverley uranium mine. This mine uses the in-situ leach uranium mining method, which leaves underground aquifers polluted with a toxic cocktail of radionuclides, heavy metals and acid. We'll speak to Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners about how uranium mining has affected their lives.

We'll speak to the manager of the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary about the current struggle to prevent uranium mining there, and we'll camp in the Sanctuary and in one of the beautiful gorges further south.

Participants get to experience affinity groups, consensus decision making, desert camping and vegetarian, communal cooking while travelling to some of the most beautiful and ecologically significant environments in Australia. Every person who has gone on a tour has had an amazing experience and many of the participants from various tours have made a considerable impacts contribution to the anti-nuclear movement.

http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/radtour/radtour09/radioactive-exposure-tour-2009

HUMAN HARM FROM LOW-LEVEL EXPOSURE.

Comment: Remember, uranium milling sometimes process "low level" radioactive wastes! Therefore, if the EPA says it is at safe levels, it may not be true! All forms of radiation are dangerous!

The federal government is proposing to allow large quantities of "low level" radioactive wastes to be declared non-radioactive ("below regulatory concern," or BRC, is their phrase for it; see RHWN #183).

These radioactive wastes would then be handled like ordinary household trash; they would be transported, landfilled, incinerated, reused (for example, radioactive tools) or recycled (for example, radioactive metals) along with everything else we discard each day.

Such a change would expose Americans randomly to more ionizing radiation than they are exposed to today.

Government and industry both argue that this is acceptable. Industry uses one justification, government uses another.

Many people in the nuclear industry argue that small increases in ionizing radiation aren't dangerous at all. They argue that there is a threshold dose of radiation, below which no effects occur, and above which people may be harmed (see RHWN #184).

They say the BRC program will not expose anyone to a dose of radiation greater than the threshold dose, and therefore the BRC program will cause no harm.

Government approaches the matter differently. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) argues that any amount of radiation causes some damage to a large population of exposed individuals; they subscribe to the "linear theory" of radiation damage (see RHWN #184).

They have set limits for radiation exposure based on the moral premise that it is acceptable to kill one citizen out of every 100,000 citizens by exposing them to radiation.

Since the BRC program will not cause exposures that would kill more than one in every 100,000 citizens (and the linear theory tells them that, in reality, the program will kill many fewer people than one in every 100,000), the government argues that the BRC program is acceptable because it will save billions of dollars for the nuclear power industry (which must soon dismantle its aging nuclear reactors and put them "away" somewhere) and for the government itself (which must eventually clean up millions of pounds of radioactive contamination lying around near weapons factories).

Unfortunately, there is now very substantial evidence, from studies of human beings exposed to radiation, that both industry and the government have misunderstood (intentionally or not) the dangers of low levels of ionizing radiation. (By "low levels" we mean within the range 0 to 5 rem [centi-Sievert].)

The most compelling evidence comes from studies of 91,231 people who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. Contrary to popular belief, most of these survivors received only very low exposures to ionizing radiation. Their health has been continuously monitored by international scientific organizations, so they represent the best available information on the effects of low levels of ionizing radiation on humans.

The bomb survivor data now shows without doubt that there is no safe dose of radiation and, furthermore, that the lowest doses have caused the greatest cancer increases per unit of radiation. (In other words, the shape of the dose-response curve is supra-linear; see RHWN #184.)

This means that both the industry assumption (threshold theory) and the EPA's assumption (linear theory) seriously underestimate the dangers from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation.

Furthermore, the Japanese data reveal another important fact about low-level radiation: young humans (children and infants) are more sensitive to the effects of low levels of ionizing radiation than are older humans. We will discuss the Japanese data in detail at another time.

Here we will discuss more recent human data provided by accidents that released large amounts of ionizing radiation at Chernobyl (Soviet Union, 1986), Three-Mile Island (Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 1979), and Savannah River (Georgia, U.S.A., 1970).

These accidents are the subject of a shocking new book: Jay Gould and Ben Goldman, DEADLY DECEIT, cited in our last paragraph. Page numbers inside parentheses in our text refer to this book.

Like the Japanese bomb survivor data, these three accidents indicate that the lowest doses of ionizing radiation cause the greatest human damage per unit of radiation. This provides confirmation that the government's estimate of the hazards of low-level radiation is low; that is to say, today's allowable limits for human exposure to ionizing radiation will allow more deaths than our government officially admits. How many more is the question. Bomb survivor data indicate 30 times more, but even this may be low, according to Gould and Goldman.

The three accidental releases of large quantities of radiation also confirm what the bomb survivor data are showing: that infants and children are the most sensitive to damage from low levels of ionizing radiation. Consider these facts:

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up on April 26, 1986; nine days later, radioactivity monitoring stations in Washington state (9,000 miles from Chernobyl) detected radioactivity in rainfall.

By May 16th, 50 EPA monitoring stations detected radioactive iodine-131 in cow's milk all across the U.S. Our government said "no problem."

Now government data, analyzed by Gould and Goldman, show that in May, 1986, there was a 5.3% increase in the U.S. death rate, compared to the previous year; the chances are less than one in a thousand that this increase occurred by chance. During June, 1986, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was 12.3% higher than it had been in June, 1985, and in some parts of the country it was much higher; for example, in the south Atlantic states, the infant mortality rate in June, 1986, was 28% higher than it had been the previous year. Based on this, and on much additional evidence that we haven't space to review, Gould and Goldman suggest that current EPA limits on exposures to low level radiation may need to be tightened by as much as a factor of 1000 (pg. 21).

In November and again in December, 1970, two nuclear rod meltdowns occurred at the Savannah River nuclear weapons plant in Georgia.

The plant was operated for the government by DuPont, who never told the public anything about these accidents until Senator John Glenn grilled Dupont officials in public hearings in late 1988.

To this day, DuPont claims that no radiation escaped outside the plant, but official government measurements of radioactivity in rain throughout the southeastern U.S. reveal highly suspicious increases immediately after the accidents. In South Carolina in December, 1970, rain carried six times as much radioactivity as it had carried in December, 1969.

Radioactivity was also measurable in local fish; fish in the Savannah river contained radiation levels 100,000 times higher than fish sold in New York City in 1971.

A child who ate 1/4 pound of catfish from the Savannah River in 1971 would have received a radiation dose equivalent to 20 chest xrays. Infant mortality in South Carolina in January, 1971, was 24% higher than it had been a year earlier; in contrast, infant mortality declined that month over the entire U.S. and over the southeastern states taken as a whole. During the following summer (May through September) infant mortality in South Carolina was 15% higher than it had been the previous year. Again, we are omitting a wealth of detail.

March 28, 1979, a meltdown at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant spewed more than 10 million Curies of radioactivity into the environment, most of it into the air. Because the radiation dispersed quickly, most people received only low levels of exposure. Government and industry spokespeople have repeatedly assured the public than no one was harmed.

However, the government's own health data tell quite a different story. Comparing the period three months prior to the accident against the period four months after the accident, Pennsylvania's infant mortality rate increased 16% and the state of Maryland's increased 41%. All together, Gould and Goldman calculate that perhaps as many as 50,000 deaths occurred during 1980-1982 as a result of the TMI accident (pg. 63).

This is an important book. Any individual fact in the book may be disputed, but the cumulative weight of the evidence is persuasive. And though we generally do not give much credence to conspiracy theories, if you read this book from cover to cover, you will have difficulty believing that your government is telling the full truth about the effects of low-level radiation. We suggest that you act prudently to protect yourself and your family: do whatever it takes to keep BRC wastes out of your community.

Get: Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, DEADLY DECEIT; LOW-LEVEL RADIATION, HIGH-LEVEL COVER-UP (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press

And: Keep in touch with Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS), 1616 P Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036; (202) 328-0002, and the Radioactive Waste Campaign, 625 Broadway, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10012; (212) 473-7390.
--Peter Montague, Ph.D.

http://www.ejnet.org/rachel/rhwn185.htm
RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #185---June 13, 1990---News and resources for environmental justice.------Environmental Research FoundationP.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org==========The Back issues and Index are available here.The official RACHEL archive is here. It's updated constantly.