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" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. ... This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. [1953] In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. ... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." [1961] ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR REACTORS FIASCO:
'cleanup': 500 millirem/yr above background widespread soil removal planned |
May 2008 photo of the Buttermilk Creek "big slide"
post-August 2009 storms photo of the Buttermilk Creek "big slide"
Filling trench with drums and boxes of waste at the NRC-licensed Disposal Area, 1980s
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ASHFORD SUPERVISOR GERWITZ RAISES USE OF WEST VALLEY AS A REGIONAL SPENT FUEL STORAGE SITE *
WEST VALLEY COALITION PRESS RELEASE ON THE DOE ROD AND THE NYS FINDINGS STATEMENT
Background
Evaluation of the West Valley Remediation Act bill
![[Image: Caution radioactive waste (10 kb)]](caution.jpg)
WNY NUCLEAR DUMPS
![[Image: West Valley burial trench (14 kb)]](barrels1 (small).jpg)
West Valley nuclear waste site
to be the safest and the least costly long-term management option,
yet DOE and NYS commence new onsite erosion-control band-aids
The West Valley Site is located beside Buttermilk Creek, which feeds Cattaraugus Creek, which flows into Lake Erie south of Buffalo, NY; see
site description and background.
All attempts to control erosion in this steep glacial till valley will inevitably
fail, a fact highlighted by the excursionary weather events of August 2009; see August 2009 storm event photos and
storm description.
The ensuing discharge of wastes will poison the downstream water supplies of Cattaraugus Creek, Lake Erie, the Niagara River and Lake Ontario.
Excavation and removal of all the radioactive wastes, including the two burial grounds, the tanks, and the lagoons, from the West Valley, NY nuclear site is
both the safest and the least costly long-term management option for New Yorkers, according to a State-sponsored study
by independent experts.
Opened in the 1960s, this physically most unsuitable waste storage location would never have been selected under the subsequent radioactive
waste facility siting regulations (10 CFR Part 61). Given these new independent findings
it remains to be seen if voters can muster the leadership necessary to reverse Albany's foolhardy acceptance of the federal Department of Energy's onsite
waste management plan for West Valley.
The DOE and irresponsible site owner NYSERDA (the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a public authority corporation of New York State)
are proceeding down
the same irrational path at West Valley as was taken at the Niagara Falls Storage Site: applying onsite "interim action" band-aids in a shortsighted, attempt
to contain huge quantities of long-lived, dangerous radioactive wastes buried in the ground at an unsuitable physical location, this time at a uniquely unsuitable
location on a rapidly eroding small plateau within a steep, unconsolidated glacial till filled valley that drains via Cattaraugus Creek into Lake Erie,
an irrepleaceable freshwater resource.
For many years, New York State and federal DOE officials have backed indefinite onsite management of West Valley's wastes, not because it will save money and avoid
environmental disaster in the long term, but simply because it is less costly in current budget years. The public's expectation that the "Change We Can Believe In"
Obama Administration would bring rigorous, scientific decision-making to federal activities has not been realized. Just the opposite has occurred; see
Center for Public Integrity article.
The Obama Administration has spent a trillion public dollars to bail out the investment scams of unprosecuted investment bank criminals, but it won't make the smart,
short-term outlays required to implement cost-effective, long-term-protective waste management strategies at DOE's large nuclear waste sites.
West Valley is threatening to come apart at the seams and contaminate precious Great Lakes drinking water supplies, but apparently a calculation has been made
in both Albany and Washington that no immediate political harm will result from the continuation of DOE's unsound and failing nuclear waste management practices.
And so, in the latest DEIS (2008), the DOE and NYSERDA call for the long-overdue (1987 court-ordered), site-wide waste disposition decision (NEPA ROD) at West Valley, NY to be delayed
thirty more years, proposing instead a NEPA-illegitimate (i.e. non-sitewide) "phased decision making" alternative that would continue to implement
DOE and NYSERDA's onsite waste management plans through more "interim actions," including the NDA and North Plateau slurry walls, tank drying, and plastic
covers over the burial grounds. This proposed alternative, widely regarded as a de facto final onsite waste management
decision, violates the purpose and intent of NEPA because it does not provide the required final site-wide waste disposition decision for the
majority of the site's wastes before significant public monies are spent.
It is simply a prologue to a future CERCLA ("Superfund") morass, following in the
pattern of the NFSS and Tonawanda, and represents a colossal failure of State leadership that even surpasses the original siting blunder of a naive
Nelson Rockefeller. Such a fundamental violation of the purposes of NEPA would again result in State and federal governments throwing away public money, this time in the billions, trying
to maintain waste isolation at this untenable location. The DOE employed the same NEPA-evasion strategy at the Niagara Falls Storage Site in
the 1980s, squandering tens of millions on a faulty "interim" tumulus that should never have been sited, see a detailed description
of the NFSS story; and in 1997 Congress transferred remediation of the the Tonawanda Manhattan Project site to the Army Corps of Engineers and called for
the use of CERCLA, to replace the much more stringent NRC regulatory framework.
The Spitzer administration did not offer to join the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes in its unsuccessful 2005 complaint against DOE for completion of the
legitimate 1996 NEPA site-wide cleanup process and decision at West Valley. Instead the State joined DOE's "Core Team" and secretly planned this NEPA-illegitimate
"interim end state" proposal which addresses only a fraction of the site's wastes. The unwise recent federal appeals court decision denying the Coalition's claim means that the DOE/NYSERDA-preferred "non-decision" alternative may proceed while the
the legitimate 1987-court-ordered NEPA site-wide public review process is now at the whim of DOE and NYSERDA, an unconscionable situation for long-time public interest stakeholders.
A 2006 lawsuit brought by NYS/NYSDEC/NYSERDA against the DOE was subsequently submitted to mediation and after six
secret negotiating sessions between NYS and DOE a settlement was reached in June 2009 and set down in a Consent Decree. The terms of this consent decree, released by the Buffalo
office of the NYS Attorney General at the end of October, clearly constitute
waste management decision-making. These decisions were made in secret and were withheld from the public until after the September 8, 2009 close of the
comment period on the 2008 DEIS, thereby violating both NYS public administration law and proper NEPA process. The settlement agreement
assigns onsite waste management responsibilities and apportions cost
splits for future "remedy actions" under CERCLA.
On September 5, 2009, three days before the close of the comment
period on the 2008 DEIS, NYSERDA's project director revealed to the Coalition that
transfer of control over "a portion of the [WVDPA] Project Premises on the north and east sides of the SDA to NYSERDA" is being negotiated with DOE prior to the
decommissioning of the West Valley Demonstration Project in order to perform recently started knickpoint erosion control work on Erdman Brook, to establish "an erosion control buffer area for the
SDA ... and to meet a requirement of NYSERDA's 6 NYCRR Part 380 Permit for the SDA." He further noted that "DOE and NYSERDA are working to develop and document
a mutually agreeable cost split for this work." This pre-DEIS-decision onsite erosion control work, no doubt hastened by the August storms event, clearly
implements some details of the DEIS's "interim end state" (aka "phased decision making") alternative.
Did the appeals court examine the details of the NYSERDA/DOE "tentative" settlement agreement prior to making its August 31, 2009 ruling denying the
Coalition's complaint asking first for a legitimate NEPA site-wide waste decision after 22 years of process? This court action adds West Valley to the list of
sites where the purposes of the NEPA have been willfully trashed by DOE.
... In a final irony, completion of this "interim" end state is to be done by a Babcock & Wilcox led group. B & W is now the owner of Nuclear Fuel Services, the private operator
of the West Valley reprocessing facility who dumped the failed, leaking facility into public hands over 30 years ago; see
Businesswire press release. A class action lawsuit against B & W over contamination at its Apollo, PA site was settled in 2009 for $80 million, and NFS is currently the
subject of a class action lawsuit at its plant
in Erwin, TN.
![[Drums and boxes of waste in the NRC-licensed Disposal Area, 1980s]](NDAtrench1980s.jpg)
A safe, fiscally sound outcome at the West Valley site requires New York State government to take the following actions:
Governor Cuomo and NYS Attorney General Schneiderman should
give priority to necessary actions to ensure the prompt completion of the legitimate site-wide NEPA process that began in 1987 and culminated in the release of the 1996 site-wide
DEIS, and to assure compliance with the letter of the 1980 West Valley Demonstration Project Act including:
1) injunctions to stop illegal onsite waste management "interim actions" being conducted by DOE before the legitimate NEPA site-wide review
process Record of Decision (ROD) is issued; this NEPA site-wide ROD should have been issued over ten years ago;
2) a declaration that DOE is responsible for exhumation of the high-level waste tanks, the NRC-licensed Disposal Area (NDA) and the
federally-sourced materials in the State Disposal Area (SDA), as well as removal of the process buildings and underlying contaminated soils; and
3) a declaration that the NRC must not apply the generic-EIS-supported, 1997 10 CFR Part 20 Subpart E (the so-called "License Termination Rule" or "LTR") to evaluate DOE's decommisioning plan
for the WVDP Premises, but instead must perform a site-specific EIS to fulfill its main WVDPA task: the prescribing of West Valley site-specific cleanup criteria
(see this discussion).
The Cuomo Administration should demonstrate it understands the near-term threat that West Valley's wastes and site conditions pose to the regional watershed
by promptly declaring that the burial grounds and HLW tanks must be exhumed, even if that means a substantial share of the cost of SDA exhumation is borne by
New Yorkers and bonding of the project is required.
THE WEST VALLEY COALITION'S COMMENTS ON THE CERCLA CONSENT DECREE
Attachment 1, Email to Jim Rauch from David Munro, November 23, 2009
Attachment 2, EPA ltr to DOE West Valley Project Mgr. Bower, Sept. 1, 2009
Attachment 3, DEC General Counsel J Eckls reply to J Rauch, May 7, 2008
THE WEST VALLEY COALITION'S COMMENTS ON THE 2008 DEIS
FACTS' Comments on the 2008 West Valley DEIS
SUMMARY OF EXCURSIONARY AUGUST 2009 STORM EVENTS
PHOTOS OF ONSITE EROSION RESULTING FROM EXCURSIONARY AUGUST 2009 STORM EVENTS
PHOTOS OF OFFSITE EROSION IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY OF THE WEST VALLEY SITE
PHOTOS OF PREVIOUS EROSION ON THE WEST VALLEY SITE
March 27, 2008 letter from Jim Rauch to former West Valley Coalition leader Ray Vaughan
Reply from Vaughan (answering machine message)
West Valley, NY Nuclear Waste Site aerial photo
West Valley Nuclear Site aerial photo with facilities and creeks identified
Interactive Mapquest site location aerial photo/road map
NYSERDA settles its lawsuit against DOE, but withholds the details
Public overwhelmingly calls for full waste removal
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Appalling irresponsibility by NY's Democrat US Senators:
July 2003, Schumer introduced the site transfer "study" bill; 9/30/05, Presidential-aspirant Clinton and Schumer introduced S.1806, the Pataki administration's WVRA bill, in the Senate. Representative Kuhl first introduced the WVRA bill in 2005. Ignoring the opposition of over 40 citizens' groups, Senators Schumer and Clinton subsequently re-introduced the WVRA bill in the 110th Congress. |
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NFSS Key Considerations and Recommendations
Letter to Governor Cuomo re upcoming Army Corps decision A Long History of Poor Decisions Blatant violations of NEPA are highlighted in a 1994 ROLE letter; also see DEC's comments on the 1984 DEIS (note comments 4-7, and 9-22), and officials' recommendations for management of the K-65 residues. Legislative Mismanagement of K-65 Residues IEER report slams DOE mismanagement of K-65 residues Scoping comments on USACE's Building 401 proposal DOE's 1986 'interim' waste tumulus said to be leaking 1994 walkover survey of the NFSS vicinity Army Corps reassesses RAB interest, again; see comment letter. Army will not form new group; Rauch letter; Army plan met by unified local government resistance; Army hires a new facilitator. |
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Sixty-seven years ago U.S. President Harry Truman gave the order to use two atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This turning point in human history is well known to virtually all Americans and most of mankind. (For a revealing discussion of the little-known targeting details see an article from the May 2003 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.) Yet until recently, few American citizens were aware of the extensive harm done here at home by Manhattan Project operations and the subsequent massive "Cold War" atomic weapons buildup. The health and lives of tens of thousands of unsuspecting workers and their families were sacrificed. Dozens of communities where production facilities were located were carelessly contaminated with radioactive materials and wastes, and still remain so. These Poisoned Workers & Poisoned Places are casualties of a Cold War that had no winners. Tonawanda, NY is one of these "legacy" communities. Today, some of its citizens are fighting with their own government to rectify past worker wrongs and to correct inadequate Army cleanup actions at the contaminated properties. These pages are dedicated to advancing this struggle. |
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Did you know?:
Even as the USA and other countries start a new round of nuclear reactor construction, Eastern scientists have revealed the true extent of mortality and morbidity resulting from the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobly 24 years ago. See a report on the new book published by the New York Academy of Sciences. Atmospheric A-bomb testing in Nevada during the 1950s released approximately 150 million Curies of iodine-131. Downwind fallout heavily contaminated much of the U.S. milk supply with I-131 and strontium-90; New York State was one of the more affected areas. ... more The most recent report of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) finally has confirmed what independent experts have been saying for many years: the dose-effect relationship is linear right down to zero dose, i.e. there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation below which cancer effects are not seen. The report states that 10 rems (100 mSv) of ionizing radiation, which is roughly the lifetime exposure to the average level of unavoidable background radiation (100 mrem/year), produces a cancer rate of 1 cancer in 100 people so exposed. Further, inheritable mutations produced in egg and sperm cells, which occurs in animal models, also occurs in humans. The report advises that individuals who have received whole body CT scans (several rems) should be followed for health effects. |
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About TNSI
Last updated April 22, 2012
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