PLYMOUTH – Holtec International, the company overseeing the decommissioning of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, pledged this past November not to discharge any radioactive wastewater into Cape Cod Bay in 2022, and state lawmakers are using the time to enact legislation that would prevent them from doing so ever.
“We will never allow the dumping of radioactive waste into Cape Cod Bay,” state Sen. Susan Moran, D-Falmouth, told members of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizen Advisory Panel during their every-other-month meeting Monday, Jan. 31.
Moran, along with state Rep. Matt Muratore, R-Plymouth, and representatives of U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Bourne, were on hand during the virtual meeting to share their feelings on the prospect of Holtec discharging up to 1 million gallons of treated radioactive wastewater into the bay. The water would be released in 20,000-gallon batches.
Twin bills in the House and the Senate would add language to a state law that regulates “crimes against public health.” The revised law would prohibit the deposit, disposal or discharge of any solid or liquid radioactive material in coastal or inland waters. Violators would face an initial fine of $25,000 followed by a $10,000 penalty for each subsequent violation.
Holtec’s pledge not to release any water this year came after public outcry following news it planned to do so. The company has two other alternatives for disposing of the water: evaporate it or take it to the company’s storage facility in Texas, where other waste from the plant has already been sent. Each option comes with its own risks and costs.
“Let's be realistic: When dealing with radiation, nothing’s safe,” Muratore said.
David Noyes, senior compliance manager with Comprehensive Decommissioning International, the company partially owned by Holtec that is overseeing the cleanup, told the panel Holtec is evaluating its options.
"No decision has been made," he said. “We’re evaluating all three options. The decision will ultimately be made based in science.”
Although Moran said she wanted to ensure no water is released into the bay, Entergy, the company that owned the plant while it was operating, had regularly done so.
Noyes, a longtime Entergy employee who was a senior manager when the plant closed in 2019, said the two largest discharges over the last 15 years were in 2011 and 2013. Combined, they accounted for 635 gallons. He said the amount of radiation was significantly below Nuclear Regulatory Commission thresholds.
While Holtec has not released any wastewater into the bay, it has evaporated about 680,000 gallons over the last few years.
Evaporation is generally viewed as more palatable than liquid release, but it is no longer cost-effective because the residual heat from the storage tanks continues to decline with the removal of the spent fuel rods.
"It’s reached a point of diminishing returns, where heat is insufficient to evaporate at anywhere near that rate,” Noyes said. “To evaporate at the previous level would require fossil fuels to generate the necessary heat.”
Panel members had their own concerns about evaporation, noting the released vapors could return the waste elements to the ground or the water through precipitation.
“The effect (of evaporation) might be higher than putting it into the bay,” Nuclear Decommissioning Citizen Advisory Panel member Jack Priest said. “Both are lousy choices.” Priest works for the state Department of Public Health’s radiation control program.
Holtec president weighs in
In letter, Holtec President Kelly Trice said either option is environmentally safe.
“Both methods of discharge are well documented, regulated, and the federal limits that have been set are established based on scientific expert evaluation, public input, and are considered safe for humans and the environment,” the letter stated.
That leaves the option of trucking the waste to Holtec’s storage site in Texas.
“This technique involves extensive trucking, risk of vehicle incident, and the water is still processed and discharged in a permitted and safe fashion,” Trice wrote.
That line of thinking didn’t make sense to panel member Mary Lambert, who noted Holtec is already trucking materials to its storage site, both from Plymouth and other closed plants.
“Spent fuel has been trucked all over the country,” she said. “There's been a lot of waste sent to Texas, again with no problems with transportation.”
Although the water issue remains unresolved, Holtec continues to make progress at the plant, including demolition of buildings and other structures and preparation to plant trees near the storage tanks to shield them from neighbors' view.
The company expects to finish its major work at Pilgrim by 2027 in preparation for a partial release of the 1,700-acre property by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for development or other use. The developed portion of the plant covers 140 acres.
Environmental samples and impact studies are awaiting review and feedback from the state. Those results, which will help shape whatever decision is made, will likely be the main focus of the panel’s next meeting in March.
Brewster resident Mary Waygan, who said she has a master’s degree in environmental science and has worked on lab and field testing, told the panel that containment is the best option.
“Dilution is not the solution to pollution,” she said. "You need to contain it and protect it from dispersement into the general environment.”
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.
Seafood, aquaculture trades oppose possible discharge of radioactive water in Cape Cod Bay
Doug Fraser Cape Cod Times
Published Dec 20, 2021
PLYMOUTH — The company in charge of decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station recently backed off from making a decision on whether to discharge up to a million gallons of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay, but opponents say it should never happen.
In an email last week, Holtec Decommissioning International spokesman Patrick O'Brien repeated the assertion that his company, which is handling the decommissioning of the closed nuclear power plant in Plymouth, is still in the early phases of making a decision on how to dispose of the water from the plant's reactor and spent fuel pool. He reiterated that Holtec will not discharge any of that water into Cape Cod Bay in 2022.
Despite assurances from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec that releasing radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay has been done in the past — and can continue to be done, safely — those who depend on the marine environment for their livelihood or for recreation are lining up in opposition.
Related:Holtec says it won't dump radioactive water in Cape Cod Bay in 2022
"We will definitely be hard against it," said Arthur "Sooky" Sawyer, a Gloucester lobsterman and president of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association. "I can't say how much fear people have of radioactive waste going into Cape Cod Bay. There are red flags all over it."
The Massachusetts Seafood Collaborative, representing 60 seafood businesses, sent a letter to Holtec and state and federal legislators and officials last week "strenuously" opposing the disposal into the ocean as an option. They want it taken off the list of alternatives.
Scott Soares, of the Massachusetts Aquaculture Association, said his organization is urging active opposition. Soares said the MAA wants a guarantee that there will be no discharge of radioactive materials from the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station at any time during decommissioning.
"We believe prioritizing the bottom line of one corporation above the health and brand of our marine economy, of which shellfish aquaculture is a large part, is a travesty that the Commonwealth cannot afford to risk," Soares wrote in an email Monday.
Reduce, reuse, recycle:8 Wellfleet restaurants to recycle oyster shells
The oyster harvest comes mostly from aquaculture and was worth over $30 million paid to fishermen in 2019. Harvested lobsters were valued at over $93 million, according to state Division of Marine Fisheries statistics.
"Our industry is in jeopardy because someone wants to take the cheap way out and poison the water where our families live and our kids swim," said aquaculturist Gregg Morris, of Duxbury. "We need a public outcry to say 'No' to this. It isn't acceptable, and we need to do better to protect our ecology, our livelihoods."
NRC: Discharging radioactive water into the ocean is common practice
Known in the nuclear industry as "overboarding," discharging radioactive water into the ocean is a common practice, say federal regulators and nuclear power plant operators.
"As long as that plant (Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station) was in operation for four decades, they were doing effluent releases (radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay)," said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. "And if it were to resume, it would happen in the same fashion. The water would be filtered, treated, put into a storage tank, characterized as to its nuclear make-up."
Plant operators would then calculate a rate of release that would allow for dispersion in the ocean at acceptable levels, Sheehan explained.
"This is not something new," he said.
The National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine reviewed radiation exposure studies worldwide in a 2006 publication, assessing health risks from exposure to low-level radiation. It found that the nuclear fuel cycle contributed around 1% of that exposure risk, with natural background radiation (from sources such as radon in the soil) at 82%.
The NRC, National Academies and other federal agencies agree that radiation can cause cancer at high doses and high dose rates. But low doses and dose rates remain problematic in studies. Although exposure to ionizing radiation can cause gene mutations that can lead to cancer, low exposure studies haven't clearly established that link.
"Even so, the radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect," the NRC warns on its website.
Previous reporting:Pilgrim nuclear plant may release 1M gallons of radioactive water into bay. What we know
Although a nuclear power plant is built like a Russian doll, with shell upon shell of thick concrete and steel protecting the public from catastrophic exposure, it's the small stuff that can also add up to big problems when it comes to radioactive waste, experts say. Maintenance work, valve leaks, pipe corrosion and radioactivity passing into coolant water, all contribute to contaminated water and air that has to be controlled and cleaned.
During the decommissioning of Pilgrim, which permanently closed in May 2019, the spent fuel rods are removed from the cooling pool and placed in dry casks for storage. The million gallons of contaminated water in the pool and the reactor's coolant and pressure-relief system — as well as water that collects in other areas of the plant and has been exposed to radioactivity — must be removed so that demolition of the main buildings can commence, Sheehan said.
"Every operating nuclear power plant is allowed to discharge into the air and water as long as they are below these standards," said physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"But just because it is allowed doesn't mean you should do it," said Lyman, the author of "Fukushima: The Story of A Nuclear Disaster."
Decommissioning Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station:Holtec says it won't dump radioactive water in Cape Cod Bay in 2022
His concern is rooted in the nature of water.
"If there are other options, and you could avoid planned or uncontrolled discharges into the water, you should," he said, noting that land-based disposal problems have more certainty about the fate of the radioactive material than the ocean.
"You can't really control where it goes in the ocean. You should look for ways to dispose of it where you have more certainty of where it should go," he said.
Cape elected officials oppose bay discharge
State legislators also voiced opposition to discharging radioactive waters into Cape Cod Bay and to the public and state being excluded from the decision process.
State Sen. Susan Moran, D- Falmouth, said which disposal option Holtec chooses needs to be a "transparent process that doesn't catch anyone by surprise."
"We don't want to have dumping of (radioactive waste) into the water as the default solution," said Moran. She said the Cape and Plymouth legislative delegations have asked for a meeting with Attorney General Maura Healey's office, the Department of Public Health and the Department of Environmental Protection.
"My concern is that we are taking a process (decommissioning of a nuclear power plant) that really demands the utmost public trust and giving the procedural dismantling to a corporation that is, like any business, just trying to be profitable," Moran said.
