Wampum

Last November I wrote Use or Lose? on the MOX scam. 134 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium went by rail from Los Alamos to Charleston, then by sea in vessels operated by British Nuclear Fuels, the Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, to Cherbourg, then by truck to the Areva-Cogema nuclear fuels reprocessing complex at La Hague, Normandy, and subsequently to the Cadarache MOX fabrication complex, near Aix en Provence. There the plutonium was blended with uranium (20/80 or 5/95) into metal oxide mix (MOX), pellatized, and the transport route reversed to the US, where the fuel elements will be burned in a commercial reactor to generate electricity.

The boats are due any day now back at Charlston, loaded with pellatized MOX populated fuel rods with transport scheduled by truck to the Catawba Nuclear Station on Lake Wylie (Duke Power). However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approved the shipment, has decided that Catawba isn’t ready to accept the load, and they won't go on record for how long it will take to get Catawba ready, or where the MOX assemblies will be stored. So the 17-foot long, 14,000 pound cylindrical casks (aluminum frames linked to anti-vibration pads) are going to sit somewhere for an indeterminate period of time.

Cotton Howell is the Emergency Management Director for York County. He's asked the NRC for an emergency plan to deal with MOX in case of an accident, a test drill to make sure the plan works, a communication plan for a coordinated response in case of an accident, and notification of when and where shipments are made in York County. Fairly sane stuff. The NRC and Duke have both told him to fuck off.

The NRC reply was misdirection and mystification -- transportation would be treated the same as other Special Nuclear Material (SNM) used for national defense (read as "This is a pilot program, funding for design and procurement of an appropriate-to-risk transport was not in budget, the DoE's using a bomb truck, therefore Duke Energy is not in the liability loop, and local yokels get as much access to transport, container, and cargo data as they do in any Special Nuclear Materials movement order -- none what so ever"). The Duke Power reply is also misdirection -- its a DoE thing, so please don't look here or read the April 18th, 2001 Federal Register concerning acceptance of an application for authority to construct a MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) from Duke, Cogema, Stone & Webster (DCS) on the Savannah River Site, or the NRC's March '05 MOX Newsletter (pdf), that in two pithy pages states that the NRC has issued a construction authorization to DCS for the MFFF, over the objections of the lead intervener, Georgians Against Nuclear Power, as well as approvals for four MOX Lead Test Assemblies (LTAs) in either Unit 1 or Unit 2 of the Catawba Nuclear Station, and provides the name of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, in the context of a classified report on ... "security related issues" which the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) has not released or redacted, but found as a matter of law that Duke's requested exemptions from 10 CFR Part 11 and 73 were "appropriate".

The short reading of the Part 11 exemption is that yes, the fuel elements meet the formulaic definition of "Special Nuclear Materials" (SNM), meaning that 10 CFR part 73 concerning the process and procedure to identify personnel requiring NRC-U orNRC-R access authorizations applies, except that "[MOX] is not attractive to potential adversaries from a proliferation standpoint due to its low Pu concentration, composition, and form (size and weight)", which means that SNM transport for any part of the return leg from Aix en Provance could have been waived (see Cotton Howell's problem, above, where the fact that MOX meets the forumlaic definition of SNM is offered as a defense to any claim by York County government for information concerning MOX transport and store in York Couty), and Duke is free to move personnel lacking NRC-U or NRC-R certs in and out of the MOX control areas. Those are Duke management, machineists, electricians, casual labor and rent-a-cops.

The short reading of the Part 73 exemption is that yes, the fuel elements contain 6% or less by weight plutonium, the rest of the fuel element being depleted uranium, and each one is over 12 feet long and weights about 3/4ths of a ton, so "a large quantity of MOX fuel and an elaborate extraction process would be required to yield enough material for use in an improvised nuclear device or weapon". So there is no risk unless assembled correctly into a functioning fission device. If some wankers with blow torches and nitrogen fertilizer and diesel fuel manage to put a MOX plating on downtown {Atlanta|Charlston|Columbia} and contribute a MOX aerosol to the South Eastern lower atmospheric exotics inventory some Sunday, no risk arises. Possibly because plutonium is no longer carenogenic, or when "recycled" decomposes naturally like autumn's leaves, or summer's lawn trimmings. See rent-a-cops, casual labor, above.

Coverage of the MOX shipment hitting the Palmetto State is available from The State, a Knight-Ridder paper in Columbia, WIS Channel 10 in Columbia, the Rock Hill Herald, a McClatchy paper, WYFF Channel 4, an NBC affiliate in Greenville, WLTX Channel 19 in Columbia, and WCIV Channel 4, an ABC affiliate in Mount Pleasant. None of these properties could figure out the name of the organizations that are parties to the still classified Atomic Safety and Licensing Board process concerning access to and transport of Special Nuclear Materials in South Carolina, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's process concerning siting approval of a MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility on the Savannah River, despite the fact that these organizations file petitions with the NRC and send out press releases. Even the NRC is a better source than the media, which means that if Jeff Gannon got a job working for any of these fine media outlets, their reporting would actually become more, rather than less, factual.

Those are the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, web site: www.bredl.org, and Georgians Against Nuclear Power, no web site, so I'll be even more subversive and provide Women's Action for New Directions MOX website: www.wand.org.

I also wrote Two texts for those interested in the Swords into Plowshares rif. The industry is working on "recycling" as their next working meme, as if the extraction of gold from post-processed persons of undesirable ancestry in Mittleeuropa in the middle of the last century was environmentally friendly and socially responsible "recycling".