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SECURE RISKY RADIOACTIVE WASTES!

Radioactive wastes are at risk of accidents, attacks, and leaks. Please join our campaign urging the phase out of nuclear power in order to stop the generation of yet more radioactive wastes, and to better safeguard, secure, and isolate what already exists to protect public health, safety, security, and the environment. Please write a letter to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, objecting to its mistaken notion that current pool and dry cask storage is risk-free, and urging it to implement hardened on-site storage.

Subject: Secure Risky Radioactive Waste!

Your Letter:

Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) on America's Nuclear Future
c/o Timothy A. Frazier, Designated Federal Officer
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Avenue, SW.
Washington, DC 20585

The on-going Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan has dramatically shown the risks of storing highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel in indoor water pools at atomic reactors. Pool cooling water circulation systems were damaged or destroyed by the ravages of the earthquake, tsunami, reactor meltdowns, and explosions that began on March 11th.

For months now, desperate and dangerous efforts to cool the high-level radioactive wastes have continued, initially including failed helicopter water drops, then the continual refilling of the pools from afar with fire engines, riot control water cannons, and other ad hoc pumping systems. Nonetheless, the thermally hot wastes have then boiled the make-up water away, forcing the makeshift efforts to be repeated.

If the pools boil dry, the wastes could catch fire and unleash catastrophic amounts of hazardous radioactivity, such as Cesium-137, directly into the environment. It would then blow downwind, flow downstream, and contaminate the food chain over a vast region. This would seriously harm human health, risk widespread land condemnation, and cause astronomically costly property damage.

Such an accident could happen here, as by a severe natural disaster like a powerful earthquake. Pools and dry casks were not even designed to withstand a terrorist attack. A number of pools have come precariously close to sudden drain downs, due to accidental near-drops of heavy loads through their walls or floors. Other pools in the U.S. have already sprung leaks due to age-related degradation, releasing hazardous radioactivity into soil, groundwater, and surface waters. To make matters worse, many individual pools at atomic reactors in the U.S. hold more waste than at Fukushima Daiichi Units 1 to 4 put together!

Thus, I urge you to acknowledge the very real and potentially catastrophic risks of current pool and dry cask storage at atomic reactors in the U.S. As BRC itself has recognized, away-from-reactor alternatives to on-site storage could take many years or even decades to implement, meaning current pool and dry cask risks would persist that long unless addressed.

For a decade, hundreds of environmental groups have been calling for hardened on-site storage (HOSS), as an interim alternative to pool risks, as well as to current inadequacies of outdoor dry casks at reactor sites, themselves vulnerable to accidents, attacks, and eventual leaks.

I urge you to make the requirement of HOSS one of your key policy recommendations in your final report, as a vital matter of homeland and national security, as well as public health, safety, and environmental protection.

While I call on you to require HOSS to better defend radioactive wastes that already exist, I also call on you, the Department of Energy, and the White House to advance policies to phase out nuclear power, in order to prevent yet more high-level radioactive wastes from being generated in the first place. As detailed in Dr. Arjun Makhijani's book "Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Road Map for U.S. Energy Policy," both nuclear power and fossil fuels can be completely phased out of the U.S. economy by 2040, replaced by energy efficiency and renewable sources; this is both technically feasible, and economically affordable.

Timothy Frazier

Department of Energy