 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program, Nuclear Free Future, coming to you from town meeting TV here in Burlington, Vermont, Channel 17 Center for Media and Democracy. I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, and I have two returning guests here to our program. They are, and I'm going to welcome them right now, welcome Diane Derigo, the Radioactive Waste Project Director for Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Thank you. Thank you, there you are Diane, I see you. And also Kevin Camps, Radioactive Waste Specialist or Radioactive Waste Watchdog for Beyond Nuclear. So welcome back to both of you specialists in the field, wonderful activists. And the title of our program is the Hazards of Transporting Vermont Yankee Nuclear Waste. So my first question to my wonderful panel is, recently I listened in on the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel discussion about transporting nuclear waste from the closed Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vernon, Vermont. And this is the transporting it by North Star. Some members of the panel see nothing wrong with transporting nuclear waste to consolidated interim storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico or to opening Yucca Mountain. What is your opinion? And so we can begin the conversation, Diane and Kevin. Thank you. Do you want to go? Well, it's been a pretty much unanimous decision to cancel the Yucca Mountain project. It cannot isolate the waste. It's a Native American land, Western Shoshone land, which was only through the treaty. The only rights that White America has is to pass through, not to bomb test, not to bring in high level radioactive waste. Technically the area has volcanoes and earthquake risks. The water table with the contamination, if you look at the proposed amount of waste, would contaminate the water table and water is even more precious in the desert. So we're looking at technical and moral problems with the Yucca Mountain site and it was canceled in the previous administration. So we need to have a different search for permanent isolation of nuclear waste and we cannot rely on this flawed facility. And then with regard to consolidated interim storage, the idea with that is that nuclear waste would be brought from all of the reactors around the country to one or more centralized locations to store it there until it goes again on the roads, rails and waterways to a permanent site. And we don't have a permanent site at this time. It's illegal to have a centralized site unless there is a permanent site. And it would trigger, beginning such facility trigger literally thousands, 15,000 shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel on waterways, barges on lakes and rivers and the ocean and on our roads, rails, waterways through communities, through concentrated cities. That's where the roads and rails go. So the Vermont Endicap a few years ago supported consolidated storage and one of the members brought up at this previous meeting. Well, we should look at that again because this is a real problem. They wanna bring it to places that don't want it. It's illegal to go there. It's gonna trigger transportation across the country and it needs to, it's gonna be the same storage mechanism there as it is here. So the Endicap was asked to consider rejecting the idea of consolidated interim storage. And what was curious is that the excuse to not consider it is it's not within the purview of the Endicap when in fact, they already had a position on it. So we joined in a call with many, many Vermonters saying, no to consolidated storage and to reverse that position. Okay, so you bring up a few things here that in my question is why are people still talking about Yucca Mountain? Kevin? Well, I mean, one person who thinks screwing Nevada is okay is unfortunately Congressman Peter Welch from Vermont. He's on the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He's on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He should be a leader in opposition to the Yucca dump, but instead a couple of years ago now, and even as recently as last November, he has voted in favor of dumping on Western Shoshone Land and at the very same time making legal what is currently not legal, which is this consolidated interim storage facility scheme. And Vermont Yankee's got an interesting relationship to CIS, Consolidated Interim Storage. Vermont Yankee uses Holtec containers and Holtec International is the main proponent of one of these consolidated interim storage facilities in New Mexico. And I've got my stop Holtec shirt on today. But at the same time, the company hired to do the decommissioning work at Vermont Yankee is North Star. And one of the major partners of North Star is Orano, formerly called Arriva of France. And they are major partners in a sibling proposal in Texas called Waste Control Specialists Interim Storage Partners. And these two targeted dump sites, Consolidated Interim Storage Facilities are only 39 miles apart across the Texas-New Mexico border. So as was mentioned, the Endicap taking a position in solidarity with Yankee Atomic, with the New England Yankee Atomic reactors like Vermont Yankee, Yankee Row, Connecticut Yankee, Maine Yankee back in 2015, if Endicap isn't supposed to be expressing itself in favor or against, then why did they express themselves in favor of Consolidated Interim Storage back in 2015? They need to correct that mistake they made. Because unfortunately, Congressman Peter Welch is using that and other reasons to say, hey, get it out of here. We don't care where it goes. We don't care how it gets there, just get it out of here. So as I've mentioned on previous shows, Vermonters should pay attention to the transportation routes that Diane was mentioning. There is a rail route through Southwestern Vermont that would not only carry Vermont Yankees waste out West and also Yankee Rose, but what about Maine Yankee? Maine Yankee's waste would go through Vermont to get out West and probably Seabrooks from New Hampshire. So if any of these Western dump sites open, Vermont is going to be a transportation route for this stuff moving West. And we call them mobile Chernobals, dirty bombs on wheels, floating Fukushima's mobile X-ray machines that can't be turned off because there's a lot of risks associated with moving this waste. The containers, if I could follow on, that are used for storage at the reactor site would be the same kind of containers at the centralized site. So it's not like we're improving the isolation. They would be actually probably the very same containers. The other concern, big problem, and this has been a problem since the dawn of the nuclear age, is that the criteria for the design for nuclear transport casks is less rigorous than the real road and rail and water conditions that these casks will endure. They are intended to withstand a 30 foot drop. Many bridges are higher than 30 feet. They're designed to withstand water pressure underwater. Let's say they were to fall into the water at a very low depth, even though water bodies could be much deeper for only a half an hour. I've talked to emergency officials and it could take hours or days to get equipment to a place where a cask fell into, say the Great Lakes or into a river to locate it. And then these are enormous, very heavy containers because the radioactive waste that's in them will give a lethal dose if exposed on shielded. So you need really, really heavy shielding, thick shielding and it doesn't block the radioactivity completely. In fact, for a half mile from the road, rail, waterway from the container, it's possible to detect the radioactivity. And so they're not designed to meet the speed of transport, the intensity of crashes. And so the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will certify these casks, but then once they get on the roads, rails and waterways, the conditions could be much greater, a fire, 90 minute fire, fires can last much longer. They're supposed to withstand a 1475 degree fire, Fahrenheit fires often on the roads burn much, much higher on railways as well. Diane, has the Nuclear Facility has been transporting this kind of waste in the past? Yes, nuclear materials have been moved, but what we're looking at here is exponential increase in the amount of radioactivity. When the uranium in the ground, it's not that concentrated, it gets dug up or mined or in situ, we check mine, it's separated from the other uranium to get 235 concentrated. That is then enriched in 235 and fabricated into fuel rods or assemblies. And these go into the core of the reactor, the uranium fuel, it's uranium is dangerous, but you don't get a huge dose necessarily, you could hold the uranium in your hand. But once it is in the reactor and the neutrons bombard the uranium and they split, give up the binding energy to heat the water and turn the turbines and make electricity, you end up with intense radioactive waste from the splitting of the uranium or even plutonium if the uranium absorbs neutrons. So these fuel rods over the years that they're in the core of the reactor become millions of times hotter than the uranium fuel that went in. So we've got in each transport container, more radioactivity, the more plutonium than was in the Nagasaki plutonium bomb, we've got more cesium than was released from Chernobyl. And in each container, we're looking at 1400 containers, thousands of containers going on the roads and rails. So Diane, at this moment, you're waking us up, the people in Vermont, and we ask the people of Vermont, do we want to put, to transport this high level or any kind of nuclear waste out to these locations in Texas and New Mexico? Vermont wants to get rid of the waste. Nobody wants to keep nuclear waste at their locations. But if moving the waste from Vermont Yankee or any of the other reactors is part of a program to trigger the movement of nuclear waste, we've got over a hundred reactors in this country on 60 plus different locations. We're gonna have the plant, if Yucca Mountain were to open, we would have 40 years of nuclear waste transport routinely every week. We have nuclear shipments going through our farmland, our cities, and the consequences of a disaster or an attack are enormous, potentially enormous, and then there's the routine radioactivity along the way. To go back to your other question, there had been some nuclear transport before, but not of this irradiated commercial nuclear power fuel, which is so much hotter, more than 91% of the radioactivity in all of the nuclear power and weapons fuel chain, that's mining, milling, fuel fabrication, all that waste, more than 91% of it is in the irradiated fuel that we're talking about moving. And so to move the stuff from Vermont Yankee now, without having a permanent place to go, this is supposedly just a stock gap place, and then eventually it'll go again if a place is chosen and could come back over the same roads and rails. So we have had transport before, but it was a fraction of what this campaign would be, and nobody wants to have a waste, but we also don't wanna spread it and have decades of routine shipments back and forth across the country. Okay, Kevin, could you comment on this, please? Yeah, one thing too that's unprecedented, like Dee said, there have been, at most a few thousand shipments of high level radioactive waste, but most of them were decades ago. It's back when West Valley, New York was doing a few years of reprocessing work. There were some other reprocessing facilities in the US like in Illinois that never operated. And back then the shipping containers were much smaller. I mean, sometimes a single assembly would be shipped and it would be counted as a shipment. Sometimes it would be a handful of assemblies. Well, these days companies like Holtec to maximize profits are maximizing risk. So what they have these days, a part of this New Mexico proposal, are containers that hold 24 pressurized water reactor assemblies or even up to 37 now. That's a huge weight, like Diane was saying. The New Mexico containers that would be used for storage by Holtec weigh more than 180 tons. So that scenario of trying to get this out of a river or out of the Great Lakes or off the bottom of the ocean floor. Good luck with that. You need a special crane. If water gets in and interacts with the fissile materials that are in the waste like uranium-235, plutonium-239, it could actually spark a chain reaction, which would make emergency response a suicide mission if it wasn't already. So nothing to rush into. Unfortunately, Peter Welsh's vote and the cap's endorsement of these bad ideas five years ago are very problematic and Vermonters need to weigh in. So coming up on September 21st is the next Nuclear Decommissioning Citizen Advisory Panel for Vermont Yankee. And it's being held by webinar or you can call in and take part. There are public comment opportunities throughout the course of the call and people need to make their feelings known to the panel members. I mean, we've talked a lot about the transportation dangers, which impacts Vermont, impacts other New England states, impacts most states in the lower 48. What we haven't talked too much about and this T-shirt I'm wearing is put out by Alliance for Environmental Strategies. This is the environmental justice group in southeastern New Mexico with a large Hispanic membership reflecting the demographics of the area. This is an environmental justice non-starter. So here we are at a moment of unprecedented Black Lives Matter activism. Black and brown and native and Asian people rising up for their rights. Well, this is nuclear racism. This is the latest installment of nuclear racism. And believe you me, if we went down the list of how much nuclear racism New Mexico has already suffered starting with Los Alamos in 1943 and the Trinity Atomic Blast in 1945 and you just keep going. And you've got the uranium mining in Pueblo and Navajo country out there. You've got just in southeastern New Mexico alone you've got uranium enrichment that people fought hard to stop. It was stopped in Louisiana when it was targeting a Black community and when our movement tried to stop it in southeastern New Mexico in a Hispanic area they got away with it. And then you've got that sibling dump that I mentioned waste control specialists in Texas right on the border with New Mexico. That is a national dump site for so-called low level radioactive waste. And now North Star and Orano and waste control specialists wanna turn it into a high level radioactive waste dump. And the last thing I'll say for now about this consolidated interim storage madness is it is risking like Diane said Yucca mountain is not gonna happen. The state of Nevada, the Western Shoshone Indians and a thousand plus environmental groups across this country are not gonna let Yucca mountain happen. So these interim storage sites are not interim at all. They are de facto permanent. Once the waste would get there it probably would never leave. And the problem with that is that these containers are gonna fail someday and it may not even take that long. And once they do, unless the waste is repackaged transferred into another container these are gonna be catastrophic releases of high level radioactive waste into the surface environment. And that can't happen either. So we face all these dilemmas and what our movement has called for for a long time is hardened onsite storage or hardened near site storage. It's an interim measure. It may buy us some decades until we figure out what we're doing in the longterm. But the shortcuts they're taking right now even at Vermont Yankee with these very questionable whole tech containers which have massive quality assurance violations associated with them. Like Dee was saying about the design criteria for crashes or fires or underwater submersions. These containers that whole tech has at Vermont Yankee won't even live up to the design criteria because they violate quality assurance so badly. Yes, and Kevin it's really frightening to me listening to this that what Diane said that the containers would be just the same as they are at Vermont Yankee that you'd just be dumping them out to another location. Under the same circumstances so that it's not any kind of improvement at all for safety anywhere. Well, it's worse because it goes through major cities. It goes through small towns and neighborhoods and it goes through farmland where all of our food has grown. So it's putting the entire country at risk. It's bad enough at Vermont Yankee, at Seabrook, at Indian Point and all the places where the reactors are continuing to make it or have at least stopped making it in the case of Vermont Yankee. But to put this and to set a precedent for at least 40 years of routine shipments on our roads and rails and waterways is foolish. Especially when theoretically at least it's supposed to move again to a permanent place. I do want to talk about the other waste at the site if we have a few more minutes to do this. We have this time Diane, please go ahead. So Kevin, did you want to say anything else though about the irradiated fuel and that kind of? Just another chance for folks listening to take action on this stuff. Shamefully, despite the global pandemic that we are all trying to survive as best we can. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is trying to ram through the approval of these consolidated interim storage facilities. They're working in cahoots with companies like Coltec and North Star, Orano Waste Control Specialists. So what folks can do is we have this public comment opportunity on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission draft environmental impact statements for both the New Mexico and the Texas dumps. So coming up very quickly are these webinars that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding on the New Mexico proposal. There's one on June 23rd. They just announced one that's going to be held on July 9th. And then that New Mexico public comment deadline we face right now is July 22nd. So that's upon us. We have to get those public comments in. One place you could go is to the beyondnuclear.org homepage and there are links there for sample comments, where to send them to the NRC, how to sign up for these oral comment opportunities in the coming week and weeks. And then on the Texas dump, it's about six weeks behind the New Mexico proceeding. All we know at this point is our deadline for comments is September 4th. They've not even announced yet when these webinar call-in opportunities are gonna be. Another thing you can ask of Peter Welch besides changing his bad votes on these dumps is to get the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hold a public comment meeting in person when safe to do so post-pandemic in Vermont. Not only Peter Welch, but also both Vermont senators could ask the NRC to come to Vermont and hold an in-person public comment meeting so that folks in Vermont can express themselves about all these issues. Right now, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, poll tech, waste control specialists, they're all pretending like everybody supports these plans. It's not true at all. I know there's a lot of environmental justice activism in Vermont. I know there's concern about the transports. I know there's concern about how the waste is being badly stored right now at Vermont Yankee. People need an opportunity in person to make their comments about these proposals. So please go to the NIRS website, go to the Beyond Nuclear website and join a very important fight that's happening as we speak. Right, so it's www.beyondnuclear.org or www.nirs.org and on our site, the NIRS.org site, you need to go to actions and alerts and from there, you can send letters to the NRC on both of these proposals and to your congressman. The other thing that's happening with decommissioned reactors, I mentioned before that we've got on the whole nuclear fuel chain, uranium starts in the ground and then it gets mined and milled and converted to a gas and then concentrated or enriched in uranium-235 and made into fuel and a lot of transport back and forth to get through these steps. Finally, the fuel is made, it goes into the reactor core. So what's happening? You've got uranium-235 in 10 foot, 14 foot rods, a couple hundred rods per assembly, a couple hundred assemblies in the core of the reactor and what we've been talking about thus far is this irradiated fuel. The fuel assemblies and the uranium when neutrons bombard, it breaks and forms other radioactive elements like radioactive iodines and cesium and strontium so it can form plutonium and amauricium which are heavier than uranium and these all are in the rods along with the uranium that is blacked by them and can't get fissioned and after a couple, three, four, however many years in the core, the assemblies are then either rearranged or moved out into a water-filled pool where they're stored and the pools that reactors are filled up. That's a radiated fuel. When you're in the core, sometimes those fuel rods get pinhole pricks or cracks in them regularly and so the same plutonium atom that's high level waste in the rod leaks out of the fuel rod into the cooling water presto it's low level waste. It's still 24,000 year half-life. It's still a quarter to a half a million years dangerous. The strontium and cesium they're dangerous 300 to 600 years high level in the rod, leak out into the water, presto low level. So there are filters that filter the water before the cooling water goes out of the reactor and into the environment and then those resins and filters are laden with this irradiated, these radio nuclides which are now the same ones but they're quote low level. Now with the, in what the nuclear industry and the regulators have been trying to do for decades is to say that some of this so-called low level waste which is the same plutonium, cesium, strontium, iodine, neptomium, amarystium, all that. It could be below concern. It could be such a small amount that we don't care about it. They've got dozens of names for deregulating the waste so that some of it would not have to go to a licensed dump. The current rules are that either the irradiated fuel, the spin fuel, as it's called, the high level waste, it's supposed to go to a permanent repository and it needs to be stored and regulated that way. Everything else, the reactor, the concrete, sometimes radio nuclides are in the gaseous form and they'll permeate the concrete and then decay into other radio nuclides. So the whole basemath, the whole concrete dome, the entire reactor over decades of operation becomes radioactive. The metal, the concrete, the soil, their spills, the routine emissions will drop on, there might be accidents. So the whole reactor is radioactive and when it comes time to dismantle it, there was an effort back in the early 80s to the early 90s to allow a quarter of that waste to be declared below regulatory concern and go to regular garbage. The United States movement, states, individuals, towns, cities, counties said no way and stopped. In fact, in 1992, Congress revoked the below regulatory concern policy. So ever since then, they've been trying to find a new way of deregulating waste and they have been doing it on a case-by-case basis, letting some of the waste from operating reactors and decommissioning go to places that don't have a license, like an industrial landfill. But now it's a case-by-case thing. There've only been maybe 10 or 20 in the whole history of recent history and gone to an industrial landfill in Idaho, but now what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing is to declare, essentially, all of this so-called low-level waste, everything but the irradiated fuel, could potentially go to regular garbage dumps or to hazardous dumps or to other places. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing now to give a specific exempt authority to other than licensed nuclear dumps. We've got licensed dumps for so-called low-level waste, as Kevin mentioned, in Texas. There's also one in South Carolina, in Utah, and in Washington that are operating. There's a bunch of closed leaking ones. So rather than paid to dispose of this stuff as nuclear waste, it'd be a lot cheaper. You get more profit off your decommissioning fund if you can not transport it and if you can get local landfills to become specific exempt and be able to take an amount of this waste that gives a dose to the public, a manual dose off the site, it's actually higher than the doses that are allowed from licensed dumps. So this proposal is called VLLW. They're trying to call it very low-level waste, even though it is all of the waste other than the irradiated fuel, potentially. And so we're calling it very large allies, very long-lasting waste. And we have until July 20th to comment. We're also, though, working with communities to get their landfills to take a pledge to not become specific exempt, to not take it. Keep it out of your local landfills, out of your original landfills. And in Vermont, there is a law that passed that requires continued regulatory control over nuclear waste, even if it gets deregulated. So that needs to be enforced. You were one of the first states to adopt that in the early 90s. So if people want to comment again, you go to our websites, the NIRS.org website. You need to go to Actions and Alerts. And we have an alert with the VLLW email address. I'll say it, but it's long. VLLW, transfercomments.resource.nrc.gov. Might be easier to just go to one of our websites and we'll have links to it. And we are hoping that people can once again stop this effort to deregulate nuclear waste. And it's an immediate threat to reactor communities that are in a decommissioning phase. Well, my takeaway for all of our viewers and for the thousands of Vermonters who have been for the decommissioning of Vermont Yankee but in a responsible way, that you're a wake-up call and thank you for all of these links and alerts, action alerts, both you and Diane Derigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director for Nuclear Information Resource Service, and Kevin Camps. Thank you, Kevin Camps, for the Radioactive Waste Watchdog from Beyond Nuclear. And please come back, this is an ongoing story. The timeframe is immediate, isn't it, for action? It is. Thank you. Thank you, Diane. And where is Kevin's image here? He's not returning. But thank you very much, Kevin. Thank you so much for having us, Margaret. And the story continues, the action continues. Thank you both for your such valuable action. Goodbye for now. Thank you, viewers.