As Duke Energy rushes towards risky, dangerous experimental use of fuel made from dismantled nuclear bombs, they will not proceed without the participation of concerned citizens who have won the opportunity for a legal hearing before a panel of judges from a federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) will represent its members in the Charlotte, North Carolina area who would be directly impacted by Duke's new plutonium fuel plan. A hearing will assess whether the potential use of experimental bomb plutonium fuel (MOX) must be considered in the renewal of four Duke reactor licenses.
In 2001 Duke Energy applied for 20-year reactor license renewals for Catawba 1 & 2 on Lake Wylie in SC, and McGuire 1 & 2 on Lake Norman in NC. All four reactors are within 20 miles of the Southeast banking capitol, Charlotte. In their application for renewal, Duke asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ignore their prospective use of bomb plutonium fuel during the renewed license period. NIRS has intervened under provisions of the Atomic Energy Act guaranteeing local communities the right to be heard in atomic license proceedings. Recent revisions to the rules have narrowed the opportunity for public participation. This is the first time a hearing has been granted in a commercial nuclear power reactor license renewal case. The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) also won the right to represent their members, with NIRS, on nuclear accident risks at these reactors.
NIRS charges that plutonium fuel would accelerate aging of the four reactors, and therefore must be considered in the question of extending operations at each site. Uranium fuel use causes reactors to deteriorate after only two-three decades (at least 8 US reactors have closed due to such aging), while license renewal would give the approval to operate for six decades. Plutonium would speed this aging process. NIRS also charges that weapons grade plutonium fuel use would increase health and environmental hazards above the catastrophic risks posed by uranium fission and must be evaluated, rather than allowing Duke to use old evalutions and assumptions based on uranium fuel.
The January 24 ASLB decision does not yet rule on whether these evaluations will be made, but will allow the case to be brought to a full adjudicatory hearing.
"This is a milestone in our effort to stop the commercialization of bomb plutonium as a fuel," said Mary Olson, Director of NIRS' Southeast office, based in Asheville, NC. "We say NIX to MOX since this fuel increases the chances of a catastrophic reactor accident, would greatly increase the number of cancer deaths from a reactor accident in the Charlotte area, and to cap it all off, we are paying for this with our own tax dollars!" Duke is under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to use Catawba and McGuire nuclear power reactors to "irradiate" surplus weapons plutonium. An alternative plan that would have treated the surplus bomb plutonium as a waste rather than a fuel, was killed by the Bush Administration the day before the judge's decision was announced.
Security and the risk of terrorist attack are the basis of a second issue brought by NIRS to the Duke License renewal question. NIRS delineated numerous concerns, including the location of the McGuire reactors on the flight path to the Charlotte airport and the possibility of a repeat of the 9/11 attacks, to the spectre of an attack on the dams near these sites that could drain the water from artificial lakes that provide cooling water for the reactors and so cause a meltdown.
The decision from the ASLB judges affirmed the gravity of these concerns, but reflected that they are generic in nature, applying to all U.S. nuclear power stations. Judges Young, Rubenstein and Kelber therefore referred the NIRS case to the NRC Commissioners for action. A week after the September 11 attack, the International Atomic Energy Agency declared that no nuclear power station in the world is designed to withstand an assault by a fully-fueled jumbo jet. Even if the reactor containment were not breached, the fire from such an attack could knock out the ability to control and cool the reactor core, leading to a Chernobyl-like situation. NIRS recommends that all nuclear power stations be closed, since there is no way to ensure their security. Since the NRC is mandated to protect the public health and safety, they are the appropriate agency to act on the NIRS petition, and their security review currently proceeding is closed to the public.
In addition to the bomb plutonium fuel case, another set of issues was accepted by the judges for hearing. The four Duke Energy reactors in question are vulnerable to a complete loss of electric power on the site, known as "station blackout," which could lead very quickly (just 2 hours) to a catastrophic reactor accident. Catawba and McGuire however, have an elevated risk, compared to other reactors, of loss of power with the added loss of reactor containment. Concerns raised by NIRS and points brought by the BREDL were combined and admitted together by the judges for hearing. NIRS charged that Duke also failed to consider alternatives to mitigate this potential for disaster, including the option of providing a dedicated electric line from the hydrogenerating stations adjacent to each reactor site.
"Station blackout is frightening because of how fast a nuclear reactor can melt," said Mary Olson, NIRS Southeast Director. "Losing reactor cooling can be castrophic. Now here is Duke, planning to use our tax dollars to put experimental bomb grade plutonium fuel into four reactors that are at the highest risk in the U.S. for station blackout and have among the weakest containments in the country. This is a recipe for a disastrous meltdown."