Alternatives sought to dumping of contaminated water into Cape Cod Bay
Doug Fraser
Cape Cod Times
Published Jan 15, 2022
Opposition to a proposal to dump up to 1 million gallons of treated radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay continues to burn brightly among local elected officials.
"Forcing this latest discharge upon the community would threaten the reputations and operations of the many businesses and organizations that rely on Cape Cod Bay's reputation for clean and safe water," the four Massachusetts federal delegation members wrote in the Jan. 12 letter to Holtec's president Kelly Trice.
"The strong public opposition to news of the proposed discharge reflects Holtec’s failure to engage in the forthright, open, and transparent process that it promised the Plymouth community and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when it took over the operating license for the decommissioning of Pilgrim," the letter stated.
The possibility that Holtec was considering releasing up to 1 million gallons of radioactive water into the bay was revealed by state Department of Environmental Protection Deputy Regional Director Seth Pickering at a decommissioning citizens' advisory panel meeting Nov. 22. It was contemplated as one way to get rid of water in a pool used to store spent nuclear fuel rods and water in the "donut" that helps cool the reactor.
We’re living in E.F. Schumacher’s nightmare future.
Fifty years ago, before there was much nuclear power to worry about, before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima, he was already worrying about it in his 1973 book “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered.” The book was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
It’s striking that the main argument against using nuclear energy was there from the very start.
“The biggest cause of worry for the future is the storage of the long-lived radioactive wastes,” he wrote. “In effect, we are consciously and deliberately accumulating a toxic substance on the off-chance that it may be possible to get rid of it at a later date.”
No amount of convenience or efficiency — or profits — he argued “could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make ‘safe’ and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself.”
We are in that “later date” and as we know, there still is no solution to the problem of how to get rid of the radioactive waste that is a systematic byproduct of generating nuclear energy .
We are in that future Schumacher warned against.
A few years ago, when Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant was still limping along, a documentary titled “Containment” played in Wellfleet, showing in convincing detail the nuclear future Schumacher warned against, especially the ongoing problem of containment of lethal radioactive wastes.
There is no mopping up as with oil spills. You don’t flush this, clean it up and move on. There is no getting rid of the mess we’ve made. All we can do is try to contain it, on and on farther into the future than the 10,000 years often cited as the age of “civilization” — perhaps longer than our species has been around.
There’s an interesting segment in the film about attempts to come up with a sign to warn our distant descendants of the lethal mess we have bequeathed them.
Containment is the job and the company that owned Pilgrim, when it closed the plant, handed the job of cleanup and containment off to a company named Holtec, which thought it could make a go of it while making a profit for its shareholders.
Containment is the job. But only in its first year or two, Holtec recently announced, almost off-handedly, that it was considering dumping a million gallons of radioactive waste in our Cape Cod Bay. ”What?” asked many. “Can they get away with that?”
Apparently they are within their legal rights. Certainly, the company has emphasized it has no obligation to be guided by those whose lives will be most affected by it.
In reaction to the outcry Holtec has said it will put off the dumping for a spell. To make us feel better it noted that Entergy had for years, when Pilgrim was still operating, been dumping radioactive water in the bay.
Fifty years ago Schumacher wrote: “It was thought at one time that these wastes could safely be dumped into the deepest parts of the oceans…but this has since been disproved…wherever there is life, radioactive substances are absorbed into the biological cycle.”
Containment is the job. Dumping a million gallons of radioactive waste into Cape Cod Bay seems like the opposite of containment.
Once again, as with Entergy, we find ourselves in the situation of having our present and future safety in the hands of a bottom line-oriented company.
Call it a nuclear energy problem. Call it a corporation/capitalism problem. It is both.
There is a decades-long history of opposition to Pilgrim. Diane Turco and others founded Cape Downwinders in the early 1990s, a group that worked toward the shuttering of Pilgrim..
This newspaper kept Cape citizens informed with its strong coverage of the deterioration of Pilgrim and wrote editorials advocating its closure.
The closure of the plant in 2019 was considered by activists a victory and there has been a natural tendency (for people whose name isn’t Diane Turco) to become complacent about the still-dangerous site. Certainly it does seem less glamorous being the first generation of citizens, of who knows how many, to practice ongoing wariness about containment and the company in charge of it. But that’s the reality of our situation.
A place to start getting involved or re-involved is a gathering for a speak-out on Jan. 31 at 5 p.m. at Plymouth Town Hall Great Room, to be followed at 6:30 p.m. by a meeting of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel.
Alternatives sought to dumping of contaminated water into Cape Cod Bay
Doug Fraser
Cape Cod Times
Published Jan. 15, 2022
Opposition to a proposal to dump up to 1 million gallons of treated radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay continues to burn brightly among local elected officials.
"Forcing this latest discharge upon the community would threaten the reputations and operations of the many businesses and organizations that rely on Cape Cod Bay's reputation for clean and safe water," the four Massachusetts federal delegation members wrote in the Jan. 12 letter to Holtec's president Kelly Trice.
"The strong public opposition to news of the proposed discharge reflects Holtec’s failure to engage in the forthright, open, and transparent process that it promised the Plymouth community and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when it took over the operating license for the decommissioning of Pilgrim," the letter stated.
The possibility that Holtec was considering releasing up to 1 million gallons of radioactive water into the bay was revealed by state Department of Environmental Protection Deputy Regional Director Seth Pickering at a decommissioning citizens' advisory panel meeting Nov. 22. It was contemplated as one way to get rid of water in a pool used to store spent nuclear fuel rods and water in the "donut" that helps cool the reactor.
The other options were to truck the water off-site to an approved facility in Idaho, or evaporate it. Holtec has said the company hasn't made a decision yet on the disposal method and would not release any radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay in 2022 while it is making its decision.
Letter: Ship radioactive water to Idaho
Citing a 2021 Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for the closed Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant to ship approximately 2 million gallons of radioactive water to the US Ecology facility in Grand View, Idaho, and widespread public opposition to dumping in Cape Cod Bay, the delegation said Holtec should pursue such an option.
"This would be a viable alternative to the discharge of radioactive material into one of the most important areas of marine life and economy in the United States," the letter stated.
Known as "overboarding," discharging radioactive water is considered routine practice within the nuclear power industry. The water is filtered to reduce radioactivity to a level acceptable to regulators, and then can be released. It has been used at Pilgrim in the past, plant operators say.
But opponents contend it would tarnish the reputations of the fish and shellfish harvested in Cape Cod Bay as well as make beaches less attractive in an area heavily dependent on tourism.
A long list of maritime businesses including fishermen, aquaculture operations, state legislators and watchdog groups oppose dumping the radioactive water into the bay.
Assembly of Delegates weigh in on Pilgrim
Earlier this week, the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates also sent a letter to Trice expressing its unanimous opposition to any bay dumping.
"Your proposed plan to release radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay, an environmentally fragile area, is an intolerable threat and this hazardous proposal must be permanently discarded," the assembly wrote in the letter that also requested that Trice, or a Holtec representative, appear before the assembly at a future meeting.
Cape Cod towns were also being asked to sign on in opposition with a letter circulating to town select board meetings for a vote. The nuclear watchdog group Cape Downwinders has also planned a speakout against the bay disposal option for 5 to 6:15 p.m. Jan. 31 at Plymouth Town Hall.
Last month, Holtec finished moving all the spent fuel rods from the pool at the Pilgrim plant to what are known as dry casks that sit atop a concrete pad awaiting future transport on an as-yet-unknown date to a federal facility that the U.S. Department of Energy has yet to open.
With the fuel safely stored, demolition of remaining buildings on the Plymouth property can begin. A Holtec spokesman said they expect to have all structures demolished and the site cleaned up by 2024. Only the spent fuel storage facility will remain.
Holtec spokesman Patrick O'Brien said the remaining costs to finish the job at the Plymouth plant amounted to $824 million at the close of 2020 with a balance of $881 million left in the $1.03 billion decommissioning trust fund. He said Holtec will update those figures in March to reflect the cost of work in 2021.
YOUR TURN: Stand firm against contaminating Cape Cod Bay
Diane Turco, guest columnist
Published Jan 9, 2022
The hubris of Holtec International has been revealed in their business plan to dump a million gallons of radioactive wastewater from decommissioning the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station into Cape Cod Bay. This ecocide exposes their complete disregard for our community health and safety, and highlights the fact that the government and nuclear industry have no real plan to manage this most dangerous substance known to humankind.
These dangerous radionuclides don’t “dilute” as Holtec claims, but accumulate in the environment and are transmitted up the food chain. They can cause cancers, birth defects, autoimmune conditions and genetic damage that impacts generations to come.
Pilgrim owners have always used our environment as their dump. But there is a rising tide of opposition. The people now realize the irreparable damage Holtec plans to create. What we have here is a corporation trying to protect its bottom line and a community trying to protect the health of our families, the livelihoods of our coastal communities, and the habitat of marine life.
Holtec has lost the public trust. Holtec came to town promising “openness and transparency,” but it took state Attorney General Maura Healey’s legal action to get minimal safety and financial concessions from Holtec.
In New Mexico, Attorney General Hector Balderas has filed a suit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the NRC’s unlawful proceedings that involve Holtec and illegal activities. Balderas' office charges that "terrible misrepresentations and deficiencies of Holtec’s submittals strongly suggests collusion between the NRC and Holtec.” Holtec is planning a Centralized Interim Storage Facility against the consent of the state, the Pueblo Council of Governors, and federal and state officials.
Back here in Massachusetts, are we left to trust Holtec to do the right thing? The fact is, Holtec does not need NRC approval to dump nor is there any oversight of radioactive water releases until after the fact, when the company files its report. So much for the NRC mandate to protect the people and environment.
Holtec does not control the narrative, the people do. With our collective power, let’s turn this ship around.
Delaying the dumping decision past 2022 still doesn’t make it right. We call for Holtec to be responsible and immediately announce a commitment to remove dumping into our bay as an option for radioactive water management. We support responsible and environmentally sound containment of the radioactive wastewater.
PLYMOUTH — The company decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station has told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it plans to start discharging radioactive water from the plant into Cape Cod Bay sometime within the first three months of 2022.
U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., shared an email with the Times that his staff received from the NRC Wednesday that confirmed Holtec International had informed the agency of its plan to release radioactive water into the bay.
Just a week earlier, Holtec spokesman Patrick O'Brien told a Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel in Plymouth there were other options, including evaporating the million gallons of water from the spent fuel pool and the reactor vessel and other plant components or trucking it to a facility in Idaho.
"We had broached that (discharging water into the bay) with the state, but we've made no decision on that," O'Brien said.
Previously:Pilgrim nuclear plant may release 1M gallons of radioactive water into bay. What we know
In an interview Tuesday, Harold Anagnostopoulos, Nuclear Regulatory Commission plant inspector and senior health physicist for Region 1 (which includes New England), said he didn't know of any planned discharge, but "we would not be involved in that decision. We would be involved in investigating or inspecting to make sure that they are meeting the requirements of their license."
Keating said that not disclosing their plans at a public forum violated promises of transparency.
"It's troubling that within a couple of days it turned into a sure thing," Keating said Friday.
"If Holtec had true concern for public health and the environment and worked with transparency as they promised, Holtec would halt any dumping until a viable solution is found acceptable," said Diane Turco, director of Cape Downwinders, a citizen watchdog group. "(D)umping into Cape Cod Bay just highlights the fact that the NRC and Holtec don’t have a solution for what to do with nuclear waste. Contaminating our environment is part of the nuclear nightmare process and that is immoral."
Of more concern to Keating than the lack of transparency, was what he said was a decision motivated by cost and not by necessity.
Two years ago, during the negotiations for longtime plant owner Entergy Nuclear Operations to sell Pilgrim to Holtec for the purposes of decommissioning, Keating said he and others expressed concern about turning the process over — including the $1.03 billion decommissioning trust fund — to a private company that hadn't yet dismantled a nuclear plant. At the time, state Attorney General Maura Healey tried to intervene on that basis, citing concerns that the billion-dollar fund might prove insufficient and that Pilgrim would be Holtec's first shot at decommissioning.
In interviews, both the NRC and Holtec said that discharging radioactive water into the ocean is a common practice in the nuclear industry and is the least expensive method. O'Brien said Pilgrim discharged radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay as recently as 2017.
Keating said there is also a profit motive to the dumping plan.
"They are responsible to their shareholders, and that's what is going to drive them," he said.
O'Brien said in an email response Friday night that the company hadn't made any decisions yet on which disposal option to use.
"We are looking at all options allowed under the state and federal NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) permit. We are evaluating options that include trucking for disposal, evaporation, overboarding (release) of treated water or some combination thereof. As was stated, we would be looking to come up with a final plan over the next 6-12 months, working with state and federal regulatory authorities to ensure compliance, and provide the public ample notice on the final disposition,” O'Brien wrote in the email. He said Holtec may have informed the NRC that they were ready to discharge, but hadn't finalized plans.
The email shared by Keating from NRC Congressional Affairs Officer Carolyn Wolf said that "Holtec has informed the NRC that it plans to discharge liquid effluents sometime in the first quarter of 2022."
O'Brien said cost is one consideration, but that "all levels of risk are evaluated and considered as well."
In an interview this week, Anagnostopoulos said the water from the plant cannot be discharged unless it meets standards for radioactivity materials and levels. The water is handled in batches (Holtec said the batches will be 20,000 gallons) and is cycled through filters to remove metals and other possible contaminants as well as any longer-lived high radioactive elements.
Radioactive tritium is generally what is released from nuclear power plants and the Department of Energy website put its half-life at 12.3 years.
Anagnostopoulos said the level of radiation allowed to be discharged is 100 millirems. To put that in perspective, soil contains roughly 21 millirems and a mammogram exposes the patient to 42 millirems, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. A cardiac CT Scan contains over 2,000 millirems.
Anagnostopoulos said that the 100 millirem level is right at the mouth of the outfall before dilution comes into play. He said that sensors at the mouth of the discharge pipe and at a distance measure radiation, and that plant employees do biological and water sampling and submit them to an independent lab to test for bioaccumulation. He said there are also risks in transporting radioactive water, such as the potential for a crash or spill along the route, and that it is transferring a problem elsewhere.
But Keating said that claims of low radiation levels in nuclear plant effluent were only one part of the decision-making process. He said the potential biological and economic damage caused to maritime industries such as fisheries, aquaculture and recreation, including the public perception that they may be tainted with radioactivity, should have been factored in. If it was, he said, the clear choice was to truck the water to another site, not dump it into the ocean.
"The issue is much more clear-cut. We have an alternative (trucking) and the only difference is cost," said Keating, who argued that the $1 billion in the trust fund came from ratepayers and that they deserved the best disposal solution that preserved their environment and maritime industries.
PLYMOUTH — One of the options being considered by the company that is decommissioning the closed Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is to release around one million gallons of potentially radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay.
The option had been discussed briefly with state regulatory officials as one possible way to get rid of water from the spent fuel pool, the reactor vessel and other components of the facility, Holtec International spokesman Patrick O'Brien said in an interview Wednesday. It was highlighted in a report by state Department of Environmental Protection Deputy Regional Director Seth Pickering at Monday's meeting of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel in Plymouth.
"We had broached that with the state, but we've made no decision on that," O'Brien said.
O'Brien said the remaining water used to cool the fuel rods in the pool and inside the reactor will be dealt with — the process to decide on a disposal method will get underway within the next six months to a year. Two other possible options discussed at Monday's meeting are trucking the water off-site to an approved facility, as Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant did in shipping its contaminated water to a site in Idaho or to evaporate it, a process that has already been employed in some areas of the Plymouth plant.
Before they decide on any options, O'Brien said they would do an analysis to determine what contaminants the water contains. Likely, it will be metals and radioactive materials, he said.
Pickering pointed out that any water discharged under the federal Clean Water Act discharge permit overseen by the federal Environmental Protection Agency would have to be part of an approved plan reviewed by the EPA, the DEP and the state Department of Public Health.
"Mass DEP, and the U.S. EPA have made the company aware that any discharge of pollutants regulated under the Clean Water Act, (and) contained within spent fuel cooling water, into the ocean through Cape Cod Bay is not authorized under the NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) permit," Pickering said. But he went on to say that radioactivity is not listed under the NPDES as a pollutant and is regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pine duBois, vice chair of the citizens decommissioning panel, cited a memorandum of understanding signed by Holtec that governed the decommissioning of Pilgrim — negotiated by the state Attorney General's office — that stated discharge of pollutants into Cape Cod Bay is not permitted.
"It's not permitted by the EPA, but that doesn't mean it can't happen if the NRC allows it," duBois said.
O'Brien noted that it was a fairly common practice in the nuclear industry, known as "overboarding," to release water, including radioactive water, into the ocean from power plants. He said it happened recently during the decommissioning of New Jersey's Oyster Creek facility, which is also being done by Holtec.
Opposition to plan comes from Cape Cod resident and officials
But state Sen. Susan Moran, D-Falmouth, said she is opposed to any release of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay as part of the decommissioning process. She called for Holtec to release plans on how they will handle all waste materials at the plant.
The Nov. 7 accidental release of over 7,200 gallons of water into Cape Cod Bay — when contractors, seeking to drain a flooded electrical vault to do repair work following the October nor'easter, pumped water into a storm drain that emptied into the sea — did not inspire confidence in the execution of protocols, plant watchdogs say. That discharge was believed to be non-radioactive water.
"Although the recently reported violation of the station national pollutant discharge elimination system has been described as isolated, it brings to light that there are not sufficient safeguards and procedures in place to prevent discharges of contaminated water into the Cape Cod Bay. The potential for pollutants and dangerous materials being discharged in our water resources is alarming," Moran said in an email Wednesday. "Further, it is imperative that the federal agencies stop kicking the can down the road and determine long term solutions for the removal of these materials safely and expeditiously."
Diane Turco, of Harwich, the director of Cape Downwinders, a citizen group that was at the forefront of the effort to close Pilgrim, called any option that included sending radioactive water into the bay "outrageous" and "criminal." Turco said she has no confidence in the decommissioning process.
"The process has been to allow radioactivity into the environment," she said. "The answer should be no you can't do that."
Richard Delaney, the president of the Center for Coastal Studies, agreed.
"My immediate reaction to putting radioactivity into the ocean, into that part of Cape Cod Bay is that it would be nature-negative," he said. "We have been monitoring water quality in Cape Cod Bay for 20 years and there's already enough pollutants going into the bay. To put radioactive waste on top of that — it shouldn't be an option."
Delaney said he wondered if it was included as an option to be analyzed, but one that in the end wouldn't seriously be considered. DuBois agreed.
"I have a hard time thinking the NRC overrules (the EPA)," duBois said, adding that Holtec will be careful about damaging the environment.
"I think Holtec wants to do this right because they want to be a giant of the (decommissioning) industry. If they mess up Pilgrim, their reputation is dead," duBois said.
Turco called on the public to start paying more attention to the decommissioning process and attend citizens advisory board meetings in person and remotely. But O'Brien and duBois said the public comment period pretty much passed with the issuance of the NPDES permit.
"I don't think there's a requirement for public comment," duBois said.
