ML20325A271

Comment (10406) E-mail Regarding ISP-CISF Draft EIS

ML20325A271
Person / Time
Site:	Consolidated Interim Storage Facility
Issue date:	11/04/2020
From:	Public Commenter Public Commenter
To:	NRC/NMSS/DREFS
NRC/NMSS/DREFS
References
85FR27447
Download: ML20325A271 (7)

Text

From: Tom 'Smitty' Smith <citizen.smitty@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2020 4:33 PM To: WCS_CISFEIS Resource

Subject:

[External_Sender] comments on the ISP/WCS DEIS Attachments: Comments on IPS DEIS 11-3-20.docx Happy Trails to You Tom "Smitty" Smith citizen.smitty@gmail.com 512-797-8468

Federal Register Notice: 85FR27447 Comment Number: 10406 Mail Envelope Properties (f98aae$1laoag)

Subject:

[External_Sender] comments on the ISP/WCS DEIS Sent Date: 11/3/2020 4:32:37 PM Received Date: 11/4/2020 1:20:26 PM From: Tom 'Smitty' Smith Created By: citizen.smitty@gmail.com Recipients:

Post Office: ihpax-esac6901.nrc.gov Files Size Date & Time MESSAGE 122 11/4/2020 1:20:26 PM Comments on IPS DEIS 11-3-20.docx 31065 Options Priority: Standard Return Notification: No Reply Requested: No Sensitivity: Normal Expiration Date:

Recipients Received:

Comments on IPS DEIS Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed Interim Storage Partners Consolidated Interim Storage Facility By Tom Smitty Smith Private Citizen I believe the county needs to have a place to store is high level nuclear waste. But the several applications for storing this waste currently before you fail to meet the basic safety tests set out in the nuclear waste policy acts. Each site seemed to be driven by scammers looking for profit or by governmental officials looking for the site of least pollical resistance. Unfortunately, the proposed ISP site currently under consideration as an interim storage site for high level radioactive waste in Andrews County, Texas is another example of this problem In order to keep my comments simple and short Ill narrow the problems with the draft environmental impact statement down to the top 10 reasons. Many of my concerns are far more eloquently argued by a bevy of experts or lawyers that have written comments in opposition.

1) This process is illegal. The Nuclear Waste policy act prohibits the permitting or operation of an interim storage site until a permanent repository is permitted an under construction. That is not currently the case. Congress has had several opportunities to modify this statute and has failed to do so. Thus,going forward with this permitting process violates the law- and is likely to be overturned by the courts, wasting the time and resources of both the NRC and the numerous parties advocating for and against this site. The so-called public comment meetings are supposed to be conducted in the affected state, Texas. There is no emergency here that permits a pandemic exception in the laws, regulations or court decisions affecting application of NEPAmoreover, there is no rush to take this matter forward without adequate opportunities for public participation such as the law and regulations require. Under the current pandemic circumstances, where the NRC is not holding public state location meetings, the NRC should extend the comment period for a reasonable time after the Public Health Emergency is over to allow commenting to take place in the affected state.

2) This site is opposed by Texas Governor Abbott; Bexar, Dallas, El Paso, Nueces, Midland and Nueces Counties; the Cities of Arlington, Denton, Midland and San Antonio. The local jurisdictions are all along the probable transportation routes. Andrews county passed a resolution supporting the site at meeting with no opponents present and no real discussion of the risks.

3) This site is unlikely to be an interim site. There is no currently proposed or permitted permanent repository. If this site is permitted the generating utilities will no longer be putting pressure on the NRC or Congress to find a permanent site thus eliminating the political pressure needed to find, fund and complete a repository The application says that transportation of the waste could take up to 40 years or the length of the permit- and its reasonable to expect that the transportation of this waste from the site will take as long as it did to get the waste to the site in the first place this requiring an extension of the site permit for at least another 40 years.

4) The casks arent up to the task of storing waste permanently. The casks are designed for interim storage and not for permanent storage. Comment filed by Donna Gilmore review the many flaws of the cask designs and their short design life.

5) There is no repackaging facility on site. It is irrational to presume that 4,000 or more casks of waste, many of them with decades of weathering, can be shaked and baked on their trip to Texas and that will not be damaged. Its inconceivable that some of these casks wont degrade over 40 years to a point of that they will need to be repackaged. Nor does there appear to be an adequate system of monitoring or testing the casks for leakage upon receipt nor as they age.

6) The NRC has failed to look at the adequately at the safety of site and whether its safe for interim or long -term storage and to examine the risk of an accident at other facilities at the site on the operations of the repository a) In addition to the proposed interim site, there is a low-level disposal facility, a federal radioactive waste facility, and a toxic waste disposal site, the nearby Urenco site, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Project. Any of these sites could have an accident that could d contaminate the site and keep essential personal from monitoring or protecting the site b) The NRC has failed to look at the potential for water contamination at the site. The staff at TCEQ unanimously rejected the low- level site because of their concerns about water at the site. The low-level site has water standing in it, and the pumping that has gone on at the site to remedy the standing water has failed to dry it up. The site is adjacent to the Ogallala aquifer, which provides water for humans, cattle, and crops in eight states.

c) The NRC has failed to fully analyze the risk of naturally occurring or human induced seismic activity at the site. The concern about human induced seismic actively is highlighted n the comments made by the oil and gas industry

7) Environmental risk from accidents during transport According to a recent report released by the NRC entitled NRC Environmental Impacts from Transportation of Fuel and Wastes to and from Non-LWRs, March 2020, the NRC must still evaluate transportation impacts to meet its obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and, therefore, requires that the relevant information be provided in an applicants ER. Therefore, the applicants ER should contain a full description and detailed analysis of the environmental effects of the transportation of fuel and wastes to and from the reactor, including values for the environmental impact under normal conditions of transport and for the environmental risk from accidents during transport. The NRC has failed to do that in this analysis.

In his comments to the NRC in this docket Marvin Resnikoff says he has found the NRCs projected number of accident to be an underestimate. Using data from the DOT Federal Railroad Administration database, for the more recent period 2010 to 2018, the accident frequency is 26 times greater than the NRCs number. If we assume almost all rail accidents are freight train accidents, the accident frequency, the number of freight train accidents per freight train mile is or 36 times the NRC/DOT estimate. While the NRC estimates 8 accidents over a 20-year period to the proposed CIS, he estimates 168 rail accidents, assuming 3-car trains.

NUREG-2125 considers only mid burnup fuel, 45 GWd/MTU, cooled for 9 years, and not high burnup fuel, between 60 to 70 GWd/MTU, which contains more fission products, particularly the semi-volatile Cs-137, which could cause high gamma doses to the population and EMTs in a severe impact accident. The DEIS also assumes a 10-hour exposure time, which is entirely unrealistic for a severe accident.

Radiation doses to EMT and the public are minimized by the NRC, by unrealistically assuming a cask can be moved within 10 hours1.157407e-4 days <br />0.00278 hours <br />1.653439e-5 weeks <br />3.805e-6 months <br />. To see how unrealistic a 10-hour time period is, consider the following. An empty Holtec transfer cask, Holtecs HI-TRAN cask, fell off the highway in Andover,

Vermont, on the way to the Vermont Yankee former reactor on June 25, 2020.The local road was closed for 2 days while emergency equipment, including a crane (9 hours1.041667e-4 days <br />0.0025 hours <br />1.488095e-5 weeks <br />3.4245e-6 months <br /> to assemble) and a heavy-duty tow truck were brought in. An accident involving radioactive materials could easily take much longer.

Recently a train car carrying low level radioactive waste to WCS caught fire near the airport in Chicago on 6/4/2020, (See NRC Event Number: 54737)

NRC staff failed to focus realistically on the recovery time for a serious accident involving radioactivity, since this will reflect exposure rates. As Resnikoff notes NUREG-2125 states that cask seals would not be damaged in a regulatory fire, or even a fire of 3 hours3.472222e-5 days <br />8.333333e-4 hours <br />4.960317e-6 weeks <br />1.1415e-6 months <br /> duration. However, he notes, fires shorter than 0.7 hour8.101852e-5 days <br />0.00194 hours <br />1.157407e-5 weeks <br />2.6635e-6 months <br /> can cause the seal to reach the degradation temperature. By contrast, the intact package only protects the seal in fires that last less than 2 hours2.314815e-5 days <br />5.555556e-4 hours <br />3.306878e-6 weeks <br />7.61e-7 months <br />.

In June 2016, in Panhandle, Texas, a train going 65 mph failed to stop at a signal, and collided head on with another freight train carry oil. Three people died. One train had 56 loaded cars and the other had 54 cars. A huge fireball was triggered, cars derailed and debris scattered 400 yards from the site. The fire burned for twelve hours. Far beyond the time estimated by NRC staff for potential contamination. See Public Citizen and SEEDs comments for more data on accidents)

In summary, NRC staff failed to adequately analyze number and severity of accidents and the subsequent transportation risks.

8) Inadequate transportation route mapping Neither the NRC nor the applicant has done an adequate job of mapping the likely routes this waste will take to the ECS site in West Texas. However, there is a huge clue. The reactor operators have filed with the NRC and state regulators their decommission plans that include their expected methods and plans for decommissioning. These plans were analyzed by Lone Star Legal Aid in Houston and are discussed int their comments. Their analysis, based on public documents, show that a significant number of reactors have no rail access and planned to ship their high level wastes via barge to one of the Texas ports to be shipped to Yucca mountain. Looking at the shortest routes to the WCS site one can make assumptions that the waste will likely journey through the Port of Houston or Corpus Christi to San Antonio and thus to West Texas. Houston and Corpus Christi are home to huge refining and petrochemical complexes that are fueling Texas and the nations oil and gas boom. San Antonio is home to seven military bases which are along the rail lines going to west Texas.

9) Terrorist Risk.

Shipping high-level radioactive waste through population centers would create attractive targets for terrorists. If terrorists were to attack, theyd be most likely to do so in a highly populated city like San Antonio, which has numerous military bases, or Houston, which is home to the nations largest petrochemical complex and second largest port, or Dallas/Ft. Worth, which have the some of the nations most congested rail hubs.

A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality study discussed the risk of a terrorist attack on radioactive waste during transport or at the site as a significant threat.31 The report cited a study entitled Centralized Interim Storage of Nuclear Waste and a National Interim Storage Strategy, which included this reference:

With the presence of any potentially dangerous material, it is important to

anticipate the possibility of malicious attack or theft. Due to the deliberate nature of such security threats, one cannot reasonably assign them a probability and calculate an expected cost. Because these attacks often target human lives and aim to create terror, it is important to actively safeguard against the negative consequences of such an attack. Therefore, for interim spent fuel storage, spent fuel must be secured against malicious attack and its consequences at all times.

For radioactive materials such as spent fuel, security threats fall into two general categories: sabotage and theft. In the former, the intent is to damage shielding and potentially disperse radioactive material, therefore exposing the environment and population to radiation. The latter involves stealing the material for future use in a radiological dispersal device or dirty bomb, or a potential nuclear device. In addition, each of these types of events may occur during storage, transportation, or fuel transfer.

The transportation of spent fuel presents unique security vulnerabilities and challenges.

Differences in risk between storage and transportation are due to a reduced number of security personnel guarding transport, fewer engineered barriers during transport, and potential proximity of transportation routes to population centers. Each of these factors make spent fuel in transit a more appealing and accessible target to attackers, thus increasing risk.

In 2007 the National Academies (NAS) Committee on Transportation of Radioactive Waste reported that Malevolent acts against spent fuel and high-level waste shipments are a major technical and societal concern. They urged an independent examination of security before spent nuclear fuel shipment to a repository.

Sabotage events similar to those evaluated by DOE for Yucca Mountain, in which the casks are penetrated but not perforated, could range from $3.5 billion to $45.8 billion (in 2008 dollars) according to Radioactive Waste Management Associates.

Transportation sabotage events in which the casks are fully perforated could result in cleanup costs of $463 billion to $648 billion.

A terrorist strike on a shipment of radioactive waste could create an immediate health and safety hazard to the surrounding population and resulting radioactive contamination caused could render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations.

This significant risk to human health and safety was not addressed in the Environmental Report.

Drones and Armor-Piercing Weaponry The Environmental Report failed to include updated analysis of transportation risks, including the potential impacts of drones being used by terrorists in attacks on radioactive waste shipments. Drones are a dangerous new threat to our troops abroad, as was recently seen in battles with terrorists in Mosul, Iraq. A recent report detailed the growing use of drones as terrorist tools.

A new generation of armor-piercing weaponry has been developed since then and an estimated 48% of all weapons used in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared. Due to extensive arms trafficking, no one can say where all these military weapons are today.

Drones now carry warheads. No NRC analysis has been done of the impacts that could occur. Experts say that the thin canisters can be pierced.

10) Environmental Justice The report ignores of the impact of transportation on communities of color.

Public Citizen and SEED in their comments reported, using EPAs EJ screening tool, that over 930,000 Texans, two thirds of which are minorities, lived with one half a mile of the railroad tracks. These

residents would be exposed to radiation from normal operations and perhaps deadly levels of radiation during routine operations or if an accident were to occur. The NRC presumes that the exposure from trains will slight, about as much as a chest Xray, as the cars will be continuously moving. But, imagine living in a complex for a senior citizens in Houston that backs up to the huge rail yards on the citys north east side, where rail cars carrying radioactive waste are likely to be stored for hours or days awaiting clear line to begin its journey to West Texas, exposing residents to one chest Xray after another, after another, after another, after another .

I thank you for the opportunity to submit these comments on this DEIS. While I acknowledge that many in the nuclear industry are well meaning in their desire to responsibly handle high level radioactive wastes, I believe for the reasons listed above, that this proposal for interim storage this site isnt appropriate to assure long term and safe storage of these wastes.

My Dad taught me long ago to look at the motive of those pushing any proposal to see what their motives were. If one looks behind the motives of the applicant, its simple. There are billions of dollars in decommissioning funds waiting to be accessed. One hope that their motives are pure, but after the site fails there is no reason to believe they will be there to clean up the mess. A list of sites that have failed is included in the Public Citizen/SEED comments.

The NRC and its staff have both the legal and the moral responsibility to put the brakes on bad sites and its your job as reviewer to stop this site now. You can and should recommend denial or no action to the Commission.

We let the nuclear Genie out of the bottle, and if we are going to put him back into a bottle, we need to assure its strong enough to contain it. This site isnt.

Sincerely Tom Smitty Smith 605 Carismatic lane, Austin, Texas 78748