 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program Nuclear Free Future coming to you from Channel 17 Center for Media and Democracy and I am your host Margaret Harrington for the past several years and our guest today is returning Kevin Camps from Beyond Nuclear. Welcome back Kevin. Thanks so much for having me Margaret. Yes and of course we're in strange circumstances here. Our title for the program is Beyond Nuclear During the Pandemic. So Kevin where are you right now and how has the coronavirus affected your work in Beyond Nuclear? Well I'm in Kalamazoo, Michigan which is my hometown and I'm at my mother's house just being here with her during this crazy time and it is affecting our work in a very dramatic way because the nuclear power industry is really taking full advantage of the pandemic as an excuse to get away with murder. So exemptions and deferrals and safety regulation rollbacks that they've long sought for not even years but decades here's a great chance to get away with it and so the first indication we had of what was coming was on March 20th. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had not said a peep about the coronavirus pandemic even though a national emergency had already been declared sometime before that but they held a meeting a first meeting with industry on March 20th and it was clear from the start that the industry had a lot of demands and the NRC was only too happy to rubber stamp every one of them so some examples would be deferring safety inspections, deferring maintenance, waivers from having to replace safety significant systems and structures and components that needed replacement and even things like increasing working hours from 12 hours 12 hours a day maximum to 16 hours per day maximum for nuclear workers increasing work hours per week from a maximum of 72 to 86 and they've done it all and this is being applied across the country at nuclear plants left and right. Another big dynamic of the pandemic at this time is there are a very large number scores of nuclear fueling I'm sorry nuclear refueling outages where huge workforces come in a thousand to two thousand temporary workers for a month and these people travel from plant to plant to plant across the country. There are some question about certainly they are introducing the coronavirus to the nuclear power plants themselves but it may be bigger question is are these workforces these itinerant workforces bringing coronavirus to places that didn't have it before so places like Limerick Pennsylvania the nuclear power plant there, Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan and when they're done a nuclear plant in the refueling they move on to the next one somewhere else in the country so that's all going on and another really shameful dynamic is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is announcing public comment periods and setting deadlines and so here we are in the midst of a pandemic having to meet deadlines and one of them was just last night it was actually the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration held a webinar only or phone in public comment meeting on their proposal to start making plutonium pits for nuclear weapons for the first time at Savannah Riverside South Carolina so it's really shameful in my personal work area fighting the dump targeted at New Mexico whole tech international consolidated interim storage facility for high-level radioactive waste they have set a deadline it's July 22nd and so we are scrambling now to try to get people engaged in the middle of a national emergency in the middle of a deadly global pandemic to meet this deadline that they are set on letting this clock run down and we're protesting it because in-person public comment meetings of course can't happen during this time and fortunately for us the New Mexico US congressional delegation is standing strong and insisting that at least five public comment meetings in person take place in New Mexico and we're going to try to get a couple dozen more in a dozen other states across the country along the transportation routes and so far the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is dead set against doing that but we faced the same obstacles 20 years ago with the Yucca Mountain proposal and we fought hard and we got the Department of Energy to hold these public comment meetings along the transportation routes. Kevin can you give us the web your website you know we will also put it on the screen but just for viewers right now who want to make a public comment they have all the information on Beyond Nuclear's website so please give that right now. Yeah our website is www.beyondnuclear.org and I certainly will put all this on the home page and we have a section called centralized storage that's where this whole tech information is featured and I just put on our home page an item about the Nuclear Decommissioning Community Advisory Panel in Vermont that's going to meet on Monday May 4th so if folks are able to tune into that by webinar or by phone and there will be a recording as well so folks who miss it in real time can still watch what happened and there are so many things happening for example some good news just last night so that would have been April 30th at 11 p.m. Eastern the Indian Point unit number two atomic reactor shut down near New York City and it turns out that the nuclear information and resource service nears is conducting a webinar next week that'll be on Wednesday May 6th and again if folks can plug in in real time great otherwise I hope it will be recorded so you can watch it later because they need help pushing back against the pro nuclear industry lobbyists and propagandists who are using the shutdown of Indian Point unit number two to try to prop up the operations of Indian Point 3 which is supposed to close a year from now but they're going to try to you know get it out of having to close down they're also trying to use it nationally as a warning that you know they're going to be blackouts if nuclear power plants close which is not the truth it's it's a falsehood but they're saying it they're writing op ed and some letters to the editor and we saw the same dynamic some months back at Three Mile Island unit one in Pennsylvania which shut down last September thankfully unit two was the one that had the meltdown in 1979 so there was all this clamor by the pro nuclear voices saying don't let this happen to you don't let your nuclear plant be shut down and it unfortunately gets traction in some places I mean I'm sitting in southwest Michigan you may be able to see the signs behind me one of them is an anti-palisade sign and Entergy the same company that owns Indian Point and Pilgrim also owns palisades and they have kept palisades open way too long it's pushing a half century of operations and they're not set to close now until October of 2022 they said they were gonna close in 2018 and then they added four more years on top and it was devastating because this is a very dangerous reactor Indian Point unit three and palisades have something in common in a bad way it's called reactor pressure vessel in Brittleman it's where the neutrons coming off the core have poked astronomical numbers of small microscopic holes in the metal of the reactor pressure vessel and like a hot glass under cold water if the emergency core cooling system is ever activated in an emergency you could fracture through wall the reactor pressure vessel because it's at 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and it's at 600 degrees Fahrenheit so if this cold water rushes in to try to prevent a meltdown it could cause the meltdown because you fracture the vessel there's no contingency and you'd better hope your containment holds but we saw at Fukushima Daiichi that containment are sometimes damaged sometimes destroyed and the radioactivity flows into the environment those are the risks they're running at palisades right now and at Indian Point unit three for at least another year and we hope that we can shorten that time and get Indian Point closed completely before then okay but the pressure from the nuclear industry is very strong now and they're taking the opportunity of the coronavirus to go about to their machinations is horrible and Kevin what about the continued transport from Vermont Yankee here in Vermont by North Star now I saw this is it's old news from back in March but they have been lax in transporting the nuclear the low level nuclear waste to Texas could you could you talk about that it's it's been extended from 20 days to to 60 days or something like that yeah that was a great article by Susan small here in the Brattleboro Reformer it's it's frightening because what's happening is there's supposed to be time limits on how long a shipment of so called low-level radioactive waste takes to get from Vermont Yankee decommissioning nuclear power plant out to these dump sites places like waste control specialists in West Texas and instead of like you said 20 days for that journey which is hard to believe that it would take 20 days to go from Vermont to West Texas by rail instead it's taking 60 days in some cases and so the company North Star that's conducting the decommissioning has asked for an exemption yet another exemption from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hey can we take 45 days can we take 60 days to get the waste from Vermont Yankee out to these dump sites another dump site is energy solutions formerly called in viral care in Western Utah these are the so-called low-level radioactive waste dumps in the country and what's frightening is they kept saying the North Star and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when quoted in this article I think it was dated March 2nd of 2020 yes they kept saying oh we didn't lose track of the shipment we knew where the shipment was the whole time and it's like they protest too much so what is happening with these shipments I mean they mentioned in the article that they sit on rail siding somewhere rail yard somewhere in middle America I don't know where the problem is this is radioactive waste and they even went out of their way to say oh we pack it really well we really pack it in there with you know thick materials as if it's radiation shielding if if this waste is giving off gamma radiation even neutron radiation and there's a lot of shenanigans being played these days always have been but they're going for it again right now in a big way the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has this new proposal that they're floating out there in the middle of a pandemic that they would love to hear public comment on it's called very low-level waste so low-level that the NRC is thinking about and they've tried this over decades and they've never gotten away with it and Diane Derigo at Nears is a real champion in stopping this time and time again they want to allow regular garbage dumps and regular recycling centers to start taking what they're now calling very low-level waste so low you really don't need to worry about it and you really don't need a special permit just fill out this form and we'll let your garbage dumps start taking this so we'll let your recycling center start taking this and it's incredible it's really scary because as I mentioned gamma radiation especially but perhaps even neutrons depending on what's in that waste if it's setting on a rail siding for days at a time or weeks at a time people that are near there the workers at that real yard the people who happen to live next door to that real yard depending on how close you come to that train car it sounds like there's some real wiggle room in terms of radiation shielding and you could be getting a dose a prolonged dose and so we call this a mobile x-ray machine that can't be turned off and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows what they call allowable or permissible dose rates of emissions to come off of such shipments and allowable or permissible does not mean safe it means they've done a cost-benefit analysis at the NRC headquarters and they've decided that the cost to the industry is reasonable and the cost to human health is reasonable and the benefit to the profit motive of North Star is reasonable and they're gonna allow this and it's requiring watchdogging and that article was a real red flag that they are weakening the rules and they may have lost track of some of these shipments and it harkens back to a government accountability office report that was done for Congress several long years ago now where Vermont Yankee and some other nuclear power plants in the country incredibly lost track of high level radioactive waste and the conclusion that was reached by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and by Vermont Yankee at the time was well yeah there was this fragment of nuclear fuel high level radioactive waste that we lost track of we don't know where it went for sure but it probably was mistaken for low level radioactive waste and it got shipped out to Barnwell South Carolina and buried in a ditch and truth be told that ditch has long been leaking into the surrounding African American community in the groundwater so it's scary stuff that requires constant watchdogging by the citizenry and also in that article Kevin there was an implication that well shipping it by rail is the best but also the possibility of shipping it by truck yeah and you know we mentioned waste control specialists in West Texas that is North Star's business partner in all things decommissioning not just low level so-called radioactive waste disposal on top of the Oglala aquifer you can believe that but they have a new proposal now and it's called interim storage partners at waste control specialists it involves North Star and its ownership in effect alongside Vermont Yankee of the high level radioactive waste in Vermont they want to ship that out there they want to do what's called consolidated interim storage at waste control specialists and just 39 miles away from WCS Texas across the state line in New Mexico there's a second proposal for consolidated interim storage it's called whole tech international which actually provides the high level waste containers at Vermont Yankee so it's anybody's guess where Vermont Yankees high level waste would end up would it be at whole text facility in New Mexico would it be at waste control specialists in Texas it kind of doesn't matter they're only 39 miles apart so that's high level waste rolling through the country and it's a really bad idea because it can't stay at the surface of the earth forever deep geologic disposal not at Yucca Yucca is not suitable in many different ways the problem is there's a risk that New Mexico and Texas will become by default de facto permanent storage at the surface of the earth and these high level waste containers are going to fail someday in fact whole text containers are infamous for violating quality assurance on design and fabrication and whistleblowers brought that to our attention in January of 2003 NRC has done nothing about it since neither has whole tech so it's really scary because these whistleblowers Oscar Shorani at Commonwealth Edison Exxalon and Dr. Ross Lansman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission questioned the structural integrity of whole tech containers sitting still as zero miles per hour like a verma Yankee right now but what about them going 60 miles per hour down the railways what if they're in a crash what if they're in a fire what if they're submerged underwater in an accident they really question the seaworthiness of these containers so to speak the crash worthiness the ability to withstand these forces without reaching and releasing their contents so Kevin what you're telling us is that the beat is going on it's getting louder and louder and the nuclear people the nuclear industry is having their way during the pandemic so this is fighting them hard yeah a letter by spearheaded by nears but signed on to by 90 groups essentially calling out the NRC on all of these shenanigans there they're taking advantage of the pandemic and it was sent to Vice President Pence because he's Trump's point man on all things coronavirus and many agencies were CC Fauci's agency the Centers for Disease Control was CC'd OSHA Occupational Safety and Health Administration I mean one of the most outrageous claims by NRC thus far is well the pandemic is not our responsibility nuclear safety is our responsibility they're pretending like the workforce is not suffering from this pandemic OSHA has direct responsibility they are nowhere to be seen and we've heard poor stories from nuclear workers themselves about Exelon at Limerick for example Detroit Edison at Fermi unit to not taking this situation seriously having large workforces in close proximity standing room only in break rooms during refueling outages it's just madness it's a you know it's a place where the virus is spreading dramatically we have evidence of it at the Vogel nuclear power plant in Georgia where you have two operating reactors and two reactors under construction the only reactor construction really in the country going on where they've documented over 130 coronavirus positives which means if that workforce continues to work there in close proximity it's gonna spread like wildfire it is spreading like wildfire so NRC is not behaving themselves very well at this time and another example would be on Earth Day at 4 59 p.m. this is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day April 22nd the NRC lets us know a minute before close of business that the next morning they're going to vote on our appeals in the whole tech consolidated storage case out of the blue and the next morning at 11 a.m. they held an affirmation session that lasted a few minutes if that and they unanimously voted against us all four commissioners on beyond nuclear's appeals on don't waste Michigan's appeals that's the seven group national grassroots coalition we are out of the proceeding now but what that means is we are going straight to federal court a couple other groups Sierra Club and an oil company who also oppose the dump perhaps an environmental justice group who was also rejected they got some contentions remanded back to the licensing board so I expect the licensing board to make short shrift of those remanded contentions and then all opponents will be out of the NRC proceeding rejected and we will be appealing to the federal courts the second highest court in the land the DC circuit court of appeals so beyond nuclear and don't waste Michigan coalition faces a 60-day deadline from April 22nd and we will meet it we fully intend on fighting this for as long as it takes and beyond nuclear's contention our legal objection is that the proposal is illegal under federal law it's called the nuclear waste policy act of 1982 as amended the illegal provision in their license application is they want the Department of Energy to essentially take ownership of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel at this interim storage site that is prohibited by this law if there is not a repository open and there is not a repository open there can't be until mid-century says the Department of Energy so NRC has processed and approved now and illegal application and federal agencies can't break the law there's actually the administrative procedure act says to federal agencies essentially you can't break the law so they're breaking two laws at the NRC and we hope and pray that the three judge panel at the DC circuit court of appeals will agree with our our legal arguments Kevin are all of these is all of this litigation going on remotely are any lawyers we're not sure we're not really sure yet how it's going to be handled I know the Supreme Court is conducting business remotely I'm not sure how the DC circuit Court of Appeals is but we will certainly meet you know the filing deadlines in fact we've already been beyond nuclear's already been before this court for it seems like a year or two already trying to get the court to force the NRC to stop processing this illegal application NRC refused to stop and unfortunately the court thus far said the case is not ripe you need to exhaust all remedies at the NRC our argument was it's illegal what they're doing they should be forced to stop so now it is over for us at the NRC they have ruled against us at the highest level at the Commission and yeah so we'll meet the deadlines and we'll see how the court handles its business you know remotely or in person in the future wants safe to do so I'm not sure and Kevin to speak to the small voices that my the viewers here and myself who what can we do at this point well there is a draft environmental impact statement by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff about the whole technique Mexico consolidated storage and Vermonters and your your audience can certainly take part in that and again at beyond nuclear.org I will post all of the ways that you can take part in this draft EIS public comment period including we have sample comments sample talking points that you can use verbatim if you want or you can use them as models to write your own for submission to this NRC email address the deadline is July 22nd one of the things we're really calling for across the country is for Americans to contact their US representative and both their US senators and request of their members of Congress that they write to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and demand for their congressional district for their state that in person public comment meetings be held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission having to do with this matter so I mean you've got the environmental injustice of the New Mexico proposal these are Hispanic communities near Native American reservations being targeted but you also have the Vermont impacts of shipping high-level radioactive waste out west and a little known part of it is that the southwestern corner of Vermont happens to have a rail line that will serve not only as the corridor for Vermont Yankees waste but for other states waste and I believe it is Seabrook in New Hampshire that's a lot of high-level radioactive waste that is going to be clipping that southwestern corner of Vermont as it moves westward of course Yankee Row is another possibility so close to Vermont Pilgrim near Boston is another possibility these are other states high-level radioactive wastes directly impacting Vermont and this is a very high-risk undertaking and so the people of Vermont deserve a say they deserve a public comment meeting in person and in fact I've been alluding to the iconic painting by Rockwell entitled freedom of speech where a man is standing up in town meeting and holding forth and you can tell he's nervous but he's also determined to say what he has to say and his neighbors are listening intently or not some of them in the painting and that's what we deserve it's our right as Americans to be able to look each other in the eye say what we have to say and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec to their shame are keeping secret all of these transportation impacts so they've been doing that from the start and we need to get this warning out to the American people that that these mobile Chernobyl's these dirty bombs on wheels these mobile X-ray machines that can't be turned off in terms of barred shipments these floating Fukushima's are heading your way unless we stop them and these public comment meetings are a great opportunity to educate the public and we cannot be denied this opportunity thank you Kevin camps nuclear waste watchdog for beyond nuclear and please please return as my guest even though we are all remote now but but the the the challenge is present it's vital and it's right here in this moment and thank you very much all your work Kevin thank you for hosting me and for all your work and you know I just point out the connections between where I'm sitting in Kalamazoo Michigan and where you're sitting in Burlington Vermont Entergy owns both Vermont Yankee and Palisades and I'm going to encourage my friends and colleagues in Southwestern Michigan watchdogs on Palisades to take part in the Vermont Yankee decommissioning community advisory panel that's coming up because we all have to work together to address these risks across the country thank you Kevin camps until next time the journey continues thank you be safe thank you Kevin