SOS Directors Mary Beth Brangan, James Heddle & Morgan Peterson with their Awareness Film Festival Grand Jury Award for Feature Documentary – Photo: Moca Media

Host Sheila Ferrando:  San Clemente is a beautiful place in California in the United States with a beach, parks, hiking, and swimming. But San Clemente has a problem. It’s a situation that may take hundreds of thousands of years to resolve. Concerned citizens are gathering to discuss and change a deadly, dangerous future. That’s why some concerned humans have made the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome. San Onofre is a nuclear reactor site near to San Clemente. Today we have Dr. Gordon Edwards from Hampstead in Montreal, joined by Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle, and these people are going to comment both on the film and on the state of nuclear energy in North America and the world today. First, please introduce yourselves and tell us how you came to be involved in SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome, the film, and how you have been contributing to the fight and activism for nuclear responsibility. Start with you, Mary Beth.

Mary Beth Brangan:  When Fukushima began its triple meltdown in 2011, we became totally concerned about the state of the nuclear situation once more. We had been nuclear safety proponents for 40 years by that time, and we realized that we needed to do whatever we could to prevent a Fukushima-like tragedy from happening here in California along the West Coast of America. And so we began documenting and working with others to shut down the nuclear reactors that operate along our coast here in California, because they, too, just like in Fukushima, are surrounded by earthquake faults and in tsunami zones.

Sheila Ferrando: And James Heddle, how did you become involved in SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome?

James Heddle:  Well, at the same time Mary Beth did, but I’ve been involved in documenting nuclear safety issues since the early eighties. The first film we made together was called Strategic Trust: The Making of a Nuclear-Free Palau. And we’ve been involved in various aspects of the issue ever since. So as Mary Beth says, when we learned of the Fukushima issue, we sprang into action and were very gratified to find a number of people up and down the coast who had the same concerns and were mobilizing to deal with it.

Sheila Ferrando: Now you, Mary Beth Brangan and you, James Heddle, were part of the crew that actually made the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome. Am I correct?

Mary Beth Brangan:  Actually, there’s only three of us who made the film. It’s Jim, myself, and our wonderful editor, Morgan Peterson.

Sheila Ferrando:  Dr. Gordon Edwards, what have you contributed to the activism for nuclear responsibility?

Dr. Gordon Edwards – EON Photo

Gordon Edwards:  I was approached by the filmmakers to add some illumination as to the nature of these poisons, these radioactive poisons. We call them wastes, and most people think of waste as being leftovers. These materials which are created inside the reactor were never there to begin with. They are actually created inside the reactor, hundreds of different radioactive elements that were never found in nature before 1939. What they are, they’re radioactive versions of non-radioactive materials, which we find in the environment. We have materials in the environment like iodine, which is not radioactive. Well, nuclear power plants create radioactive iodine. Similarly, with strontium and cesium, they’re non-radioactive minerals in the soil. You can find them anywhere, but the nuclear reactor produces radioactive varieties of these. So what is radioactivity? The radioactive materials have atoms that are unstable and that explode. They’re like little time bombs that will explode.

That doesn’t happen with non-radioactive materials. And when those little explosions occur, submicroscopic, they damage the DNA molecules in the human body or animal bodies, and that causes a host of illnesses, including cancers and including genetic damage. So my job in the film is simply to provide a little bit of illumination as to the nature of these wastes and why it’s reasonable to be afraid of them. Just like it’s reasonable to be afraid of fire, it’s reasonable to be afraid of earthquakes, it’s reasonable to be afraid of war. Well, it’s reasonable to be afraid of these things, too. And in fact, we’ve seen in the Ukraine War where Russia is invading Ukraine, we’ve seen the Atomic Energy Commission chairman announcing to the world that there is reason to be afraid of a nuclear catastrophe as a result of military actions that might release these materials into the environment. That’s basically my role.

Sheila Ferrando:  Let’s delve further into the story at San Onofre what is the story at San Onofre and why was the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome made?

Mary Beth Brangan:  Well, the situation at San Onofre, people were becoming concerned because whistle-blowers were contacting the residents around the plant and alerting them that things were not right there, that they were having a lot of safety violations that were not being addressed by the management. And so they were very brave and contacted people that they hoped would help them. And then sure enough, there was a leak of radioactivity from the reactors and they had to close it down. So then people really began educating themselves even more deeply and discovered that the management wanted to restart the broken reactor without fixing it first. They just wanted to protect their investment. So there was a huge outcry and effort by people on many, many levels. There were legal challenges, there were backroom negotiations with the governor and the utility company, and then there was a huge amount of grassroots organizing and it all miraculously came together. The people were able to have it shut down.

James Heddle:  Those are the two focal points of San Onofre the film. One is the power of informed citizen action to influence policy and practice, and the other is the fact that San Onofre with its stranded waste there is a microcosm of a situation that exists all over the country and in fact all over the world. And that was our intention, to start the discussion of this really under-discussed, off the radar screen issue. And the reason we wanted to involve an expert like Dr. Edwards is that we had read his opinion that the age of nuclear waste is just beginning and we really need to get ahold of what scant solutions or at least safety approaches there are at this date. We’re already in great danger all around the country.

Mary Beth Brangan:  And the world.

James Heddle:   And the world. I’d appreciate it, Gordon, if you’d expand on your idea that the age of nuclear waste is just beginning.

Sheila Ferrando:  What was being done in San Onofre to change the situation into safety for the populace?

Mary Beth Brangan:  Well, not enough, and that’s why we’re sounding the alarm. What we wanted to highlight in our film was that there is something that we could do immediately, well, on the scale of nuclear facilities, that means like within the next 10 years. So when we heard Dr. Edwards speak in Chicago way back in 2015 about Rolling Stewardship, it really resonated with us because we had already been appreciating the concept of guardianship that Joanna Macy, who’s a Buddhist scholar and anti-nuclear activist, among other things, had been promoting. And we really appreciated that and wanted people to have a sense that there was something that could be done. And Dr. Edwards had a really brilliant articulation of that, which is the Rolling Stewardship concept.

Sheila Ferrando:

Dr. Edwards, could you please explain the Rolling Stewardship concept?

Gordon Edwards:  Yes. The Rolling Stewardship concept was actually evolved decades ago by the National Academy of Sciences. They were dealing with materials which are highly toxic and which have an infinite lifetime, heavy metals like mercury and lead and arsenic and so on. We have waste which must be safely guarded, kept out of the human environment because of their harmful effects. And their idea was instead of just dumping it somewhere and hoping for the best, to have a Rolling Stewardship program which is intergenerational in nature, where each generation passes on the knowledge and responsibility for looking after these wastes, packaging them, and making sure that any leakage that occurs is immediately addressed and corrected, and that repackaging takes place regularly in sturdier and sturdier packages, hopefully, so that the risk is being managed, not eliminated because we don’t know how to eliminate these materials, but we can manage the risk and safeguard our children and our grandchildren.

Well, the same thing can be done with radioactive waste if we accept the fact that we don’t really have a solution. We can’t wish these things out of existence. We have created them. We have hundreds of radioactive materials which never existed before 1939. I was born in 1940, so that means these wastes are no older than I am, and it’s quite possible in the next hundred or 200 years that we may find a way of actually solving the problem by destroying these wastes, truly destroying them, or rendering them harmless. And there are various things you can think about. For example, if we had a magical way of putting these wastes in the center of the sun, that would destroy them. That would actually destroy them. But we don’t know how to do that safely. Meanwhile, we should not abandon the waste as the industry wants to do.

Both the industry and the regulatory agency wants to put these wastes somewhere deep underground and simply walk away from it. That’s abandonment. We believe that’s irresponsible because these wastes are going to remain dangerous far longer than human civilization, in fact, far longer than the human species. So we’re talking about hundreds of thousands and millions of years, in fact. In the meantime, we believe that we should accept the fact that we don’t have a final solution to this problem, therefore, we should adopt a policy of intergenerational Rolling Stewardship, packaging and repackaging this waste, and having people on guard, on duty all the time to ensure that whatever leakage occurs is immediately corrected and the spilled material is retrieved and put back into proper containers. That’s the idea of Rolling Stewardship. But one thing that you mustn’t do is leave them in highly vulnerable positions right beside the ocean in a high earthquake zone where at any moment, these wastes could simply be taken by nature, by some natural disaster out of our control.

Also, there’s a problem of human activity. For example, military conflicts. The concept has developed, it’s called the HOSS, hardened onsite storage. Hardened onsite storage means that we keep these waste in bunkers in very heavy containers, not thin-walled containers as we now have, but thick-walled containers which are able to resist a great deal of abuse and which can then be corrected and repackaged later on as well. That’s the idea of Rolling Stewardship. It’s not a solution, but it is a countervailing current to just blind fear where you just say, we’re helpless. We can’t do anything about this. Of course we can do things about this, but it becomes a societal problem and not merely an industry problem.

Sheila Ferrando:  During the making of the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome, what roadblocks did you encounter?

James Heddle:  I don’t know that we encountered any roadblock, aside from trying to get funding and a few technical problems. There is an interest in this issue. We found since we released the film that there’s a great deal of enthusiasm among reactor communities, organizations, for using the film. One of the early comments from a group in the east of the United States, the Stop Hole Tech Coalition, was that this film is made for organizers, and that’s largely due to the perspectives of Mary Beth, but we’re very pleased that activist organizations and individuals around the country are eagerly adapting it to their own purposes.

What it ties into, too, is the current push for a new generation of small nuclear reactors and also the resuscitation of old rickety over-aged and embrittled reactors. And we were curious initially why this is happening, why the big push now? And it turns out that it’s the joined at the hip nature of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons that is the motivation for this. They are codependent industries. They share infrastructure and educational institutions. One can’t exist without the other. They demand each other’s presence. And this is something we didn’t go into depth with in the film, but the process of making the film made this very clear to us, and hopefully in future films, we will explore and develop that insight.

Mary Beth Brangan:  Now, about a third of the population of the United States lives in close proximity to a nuclear reactor or radioactive waste from weapons facilities, probably closer to half when you count in the weapons waste and weapons making horrible messes all over the country. And in Canada as well, I would say. Absolutely. So there are a lot of people who need to be aware of this, a growing number are, and do want to use the information in the film.

Sheila Ferrando:  Where is the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome currently being shown, and is anyone trying to stop this and why?

Mary Beth Brangan:  You mean stop the showing of the film?

Sheila Ferrando:  Have you been prevented anywhere from distributing information about nuclear consciousness?

Mary Beth Brangan:  No, we haven’t, thank goodness. And actually, though the purpose, well, we’re encouraging people to understand the risk of transportation so that they know that you can’t just ship it away and contaminate another site, which would normally be somewhere by people who were so poor that are politically disempowered that they couldn’t refuse to accept the waste.

James Heddle:   There’s a movement now for informed consent citing. That means they’re going to approach various communities and regions and say, wouldn’t you like to have this waste? We can pay you a lot of money, or we can do this or that for you. But it’s almost guaranteed to make targets out of the minority communities with much less political clout than other communities.

Sheila Ferrando:  Where is the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome currently being shown?

James Heddle:  Well, it received its world premier in Los Angeles at the Awareness Film Festival where it was awarded the Grand Jury Award for documentary features. That got us off to a great start and that stimulated a lot of interest. Just last night, we had a Zoom showing by an organization in Topanga Canyon, which was well received, and the fact the film was introduced by Dan Hirsch, one of the experts in the film, and also commented on by Harvey Wasserman, who is a longtime friend and lifetime nuclear safety advocate. So we have a wonderful team of impact producers. That’s the new designation for the enterprise of promoting the showing and awareness of films on social issues. So there’s a whole long list of future showings that is being developed in communities across the country, and it’s already been accepted into the Uranium Film Festival. It will be shown in Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, and at least 18 other cities across the United States in the coming year. So we’re very pleased with the reception, and so far we haven’t been attacked or prevented from disseminating our message, and we hope that it continues.

Mary Beth Brangan:  The politician who is in the area of San Clemente, [Democrat Mike Levin] he represents them in national Congress. He’s a proponent of moving it to other places, promising the local communities, oh, we’ll just get it out of here and we’ll put you on the top of the list to move it. He made a video to go with our documentary so he could put out his perspective, which is let’s move it out of here. Also, to promote building of small nuclear reactors. Everybody’s being polite and trying to coexist, but there’s a lot of differing opinions here that we’re encountering.

And even in the movement. Some people think it’s too dangerous to keep this waste on the surface of the planet and that it should be in holes in the ground, which it’s a real dilemma. Those in the Nuclear Safety Movement who hold that position think, well, it won’t be able to be repackaged after a while, and it will inevitably go critical because it’ll fall to the bottom of the canisters, cause another fission and maybe explosion. So that’s what we’re encountering now is that deep discussion. What would be the best way to handle this?

James Heddle:  And that is very gratifying for us because as I said, our main motivation is to trigger or catalyze a discussion of this very under-discussed issue.

Mary Beth Brangan:  But discuss from the point of a moral point of view, an ethical point of view, so that you’re considering if you move it, what are you doing? You’re risking people all along the transportation route and then the ultimate destination, of course, and you are increasing the contamination that way.

James Heddle:  We were really hoping that we will collectively discover the most ecologically, technologically, and morally or ethically effective way of dealing with this very serious ecological and really an existential problem.

Gordon Edwards:  Well, that’s fine. I just wanted to say that one of the positive things is that ethics and practicality sometimes are in conflict, but in the case of energy, renewable energy doesn’t create any new toxic materials. It’s already four times cheaper than nuclear and four times faster to deploy. And in fact, the International Energy Agency says that 90% of new electricity worldwide over the next five years will all be wind or solar. So this is a very positive outlook in the fact that we had transitioned to a truly renewable future which will not pose these dangers. Meanwhile, we just have to look after the problems that the industry has left us with. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole again.

Sheila Ferrando:  If our listeners wish to see the film SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome, where should they be?

Mary Beth Brangan:  They should send an inquiry to info@SanOnofreSyndrome.com, and we would love to have more people showing it all over the world.

James Heddle:  That is our website. They can go there for much more information.

Mary Beth Brangan:  SanOnofreSyndrome.com.

Sheila Ferrando:  Thank you for your interview today. You have been listening to Mary Beth Brangan, James Heddle, and Dr. Gordon Edwards speaking about nuclear energy, the nuclear problem, and SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome. I’m your host, Sheila Ferrando.PMocaMeccia

James Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan are co-founders of EON – the Ecological Options  Network.  The EON production SOS – The San Onofry Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy received it’s World Premier at the Awareness Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA October 10, 2023, where it won the Grand Jury Award for feature documentary.  SOS was directed by Heddle, Brangan and Morgan Peterson, who also served as editor. SanOnofreSyndrome.com

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA – energy.go

By James Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan – EON      Crossposted on Substack

Protests at California’s Thermonuclear Bomb Factory

Every year now for more than a decade advocates of peace and denuclearization have converged on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California to commemorate Hiroshima Day, the anniversery of the droping of America’s first atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945.

Livermore Lab, which has billed itself on its website as “The Smartest Place on Earth,” is a key node in the U.S. network of nuclear weapons research, development and production – a perpetually on-going process consuming billions of dollars each year.

Source: clearpath.org

The yearly non-violent Livermore demonstrations, organized by Tri-Valley Cares and a coallition of sister organizations, has historically involved a rally and a march and ritualized ‘die-in’ at the Laboratory Gates.

Each year a regular keynote speaker at the ralleys has been the late, legendary Pentagton Papers whistlebolwer Daniel Ellsberg who died this June 16. Along with other video producers, EON has documented many of the past years’ events.

This year, Ed Ellworth of Enlightened Films has been commissioned to produce a video compendium of Ellsberg’s rally talks from past years. We’re glad to have been able to contribute footage to the project. Here is the result.

A Review of Ellesberg’s book Doomeday Machine

We also want to honor Ellsberg by sharing this 2018 Counterpunch article.

Rational Insanity: the Mad Logic of America’s Nuclear ‘Doomsday Machine’

by James Heddle

James Heddle Co-Directs EON, the Ecological Options Network with Mary Beth Brangan. The EON feature documentary S.O.S. – The San Onofre Syndrome – Nuclear Power’s Legacy will be released later this year.

A view of the dry spent fuel storage facility in the foreground as surfers ride the waves at San Onofre State Beach, CA, April 21, 2022. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Getty Images

Compiled byJames Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan – EON
Crossposted on Substack

Stranded Spent Nuclear Fuel with Nowhere to Go – A Clear & Present Threat to National Security

A string of pellets cased in the zirconium cladding is called a fuel rod. Source

It is usually 4-5 meters long. Each rod contains 350-400 pellets. Source

                                             Credit: world-nuclear.org

A human being standing close to an unshielded hot fuel rod would receive a lethal dose of radiation in just minutes. Source

Ten years after removal of spent fuel from a reactor, the radiation dose 1 meter away from a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 20,000 rems per hour. A dose of 5,000 rems would be expected to cause immediate incapacitation and death within one week. Source

Each fuel assembly contains 179-264 rods. Source

Holtec canisters each contain 37 fuel assemblies.

Photo: holtecinternational.com

Each canister contains more highly radioactive Cesium-137 than was released from Chernobyl. Source

Even a microscopic through-wall crack will release millions of curies of radiation into the environment states Dr. Kris Singh, President and CEO of Holtec. Source

The San Onofre ISFSI houses 73 vertical Holtec canisters. Source

Another 51 Areva NUHOMS canisters sit in a separate, horizontal dry storage facility nearby on-site, with 13 more in the process of being added. Source

These containers do not meet the Nuclear Waste Policy Act or NRC safety requirements for monitored, retrievable fuel storage or transport.

In any case, a U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board report suggests that this spent fuel may not be cool enough to meet transportation rules to move until the year 2100. [See pgs. 76 & 77]

These canisters are licensed for 20 years, but have no manufacturer’s warranty.

Some canisters like these have been shown to fail in less than 20 years. Source

Some of the horizontal canisters at San Onofre are already 20 years old. Source

No Federal central repository for high level radioactive waste now exists, nor is likely to be approved and constructed any time soon.

About 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities. A proposed new generation of SMRs will produce even more, more toxic forms of waste. Source

Any Questions?

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle Co-Direct EON, the Ecological Options Network.. The EON feature documentary S.O.S. – The San Onofre Syndrome – Nuclear Power’s Legacy will be released later this year.

Credit: theregister.co.uk

The Red Queen on Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Weapons, San Onofre, Diablo Canyon, and Radioactive Waste

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’“ – Louis Carroll – Through the Looking Glass

By James Heddle – EON
Crossposted on Substack

Six Impossible Things The Red Queen Believes Before Breakfast About Nuclear Energy

1.     It’s clean and green, never has any radioactive emissions in normal operation, and has no carbon emissions at any part of the nuclear cycle from mining, to milling, to refining, to transport, to operation, to radioactive waste management.

2.     It’s safe; history doesn’t show there’s been at least one a major nuclear disaster every 10 years since the birth of the Nuclear Age.  Nobody died at Chernobyl or Fukushima, and now nature and wildlife are flourishing around the plants.

3.     There are safe dose levels of radioactive exposure; in fact, a little can actually be good for you.  It’s called ‘hormesis.’

4.     There is no real connection between the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industries, but we need both to maintain national security.

5.     Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) will be inherently safe and won’t produce much radioactive waste, which is, anyway, easy to manage and isolate from the environment for millions of years.

6.     A revival of the failing commercial nuclear energy at tax-payer and rate-payer expense is necessary to save us from climate change and will be well worth the price.

Six Impossible Things The Red Queen Believes Before Breakfast About Nuclear Weapons

1.     The United States does not maintain and constantly upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal in order to threaten or dominate other countries, but only for deterrence of potential attacks by others.

2.     The nuclear weapons industry is completely separate and independent from the private, investor owned commercial nuclear energy production industry.

3.     The nuclear weapons industry and the nuclear powered Navy are not in any way dependent on the continued existence of the financially troubled commercial nuclear power industry; they do not benefit from the tax-payer and rate-payer subsidized manufacturing infrastructure, the university-educated labor pool and the research facilities of commercial power production.

4.     There are many enduring roles for U.S. nuclear weapons to maintain world peace.

5.     “The conditions do not now exist for the United States to safely take additional steps to further reduce the number and role of U.S. nuclear weapons.” Source.

6.     Other countries have refused to join the growing international consensus against nuclear weapons represented by the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons ( TPNW ), and continued U.S. national security requires possession of up to date nuclear weapons.

Six Impossible Things The Red Queen Believes Before Breakfast About San Onofre’s Radioactive Waste Dump by the Sea

1.     Southern California Edison and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can be trusted to always make decisions in the best interests of public safety.

2.     The l,800 tons of stranded, highly radioactive spent fuel rods now stored at San Onofre in a flood, tsunami and earthquake zone are sure to remain safe well into the future.

3.     The air-cooled, thin metal, welded canisters in which the irradiated rods are now stored will not develop through-wall cracks and leaks as a result of stress-corrosion cracking in the damp, salt air.

4.     As soon as the location for a Consolidated Interim Storage Facility (CISF) can be found – hopefully in New Mexico or Texas – the San Onofre canisters will be the first to be moved there by rail or highway.

5.     Though the canisters are not approved for transport, they can be placed in protective over-packs for transport when the time comes. Despite reports that coastal cliffs are crumbling under the railroad tracks over which the heavy containers will have to be moved, there will be no problem getting them out of there, once a target location has been found.

6.     There will be no need to spend the money to build an expensive hot-cell facility in which the canisters can be robotically opened and the fuel rods inspected before they are repackaged in safely storable, transportable, thick casks for indefinite storage in a secure, climate-controlled building to await eventual transport.

Six Impossible Things The Red Queen Believes Before Breakfast About Diablo Canyon’s Extended Operation

1.     There are no credible risks involved in operating an aged nuclear reactor – reportedly one of the  most embrittled in the nation and located near several active earthquake faults – for 10 or twenty or more years past its designed lifespan.

2.     No inspection of the embrittled reactors is necessary to assess risks.

3.     The electricity produced by the plant is necessary to prevent blackouts of the state power grid.

4.     The plant’s operation will not interfere with inputting electricity from renewable sources.

5.     It is only fair that rate-payers around the state outside PG&E’s service area be charged for power they are not receiving.

6.     Diablo’s continued operation is necessary to help save the planet from climate change.

Six Impossible Things The Red Queen Believes Before Breakfast About Radioactive Waste

1.     Radioactive waste is an economic and energy resource and can now be safely reprocessed for a number of peaceful uses, and does not lend itself to intentional deployment as a weapon of mass destruction.

2.     The management, storage and reprocessing of radioactive waste can be an ecologically valid growth industry far into the future, thus supporting the continuation of nuclear power production, which, as we all know, is the only solution to climate change.

3.     We now have the know-how and existing state-of-the-art technologies and containment systems necessary to keep fast-growing tons of corrosive radioactive waste from nuclear energy and weapons production safely isolated from the environment for millions of  years.

4.     The approximately 88,000 metric tons of highly radioactive Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) in the form of used irradiated fuel rods sealed in thin, welded steel containers vulnerable to corrosion cracking now stranded at over 93 commercial nuclear reactors operating in the United States at 55 locations in 28 states around the country are not ticking time-bombs waiting to be detonated by accident, terrorist sabotage, or rocket attacks from foreign adversaries.

5.     The development of technology able to transmute radioactive waste into harmless and even useful substances is just around the corner.

6.     It’s only a matter of time before a site is found in the U.S. for a federally operated, deep geological repository where the tons of unwanted radioactive waste materials from around the country can be safely transported over rails, roads and barges and dumped for eternity, that will never infiltrate into the water or soil, and be perpetually overseen by highly trained, well-funded teams of expert technicians.

James Heddle Co-Directs EON, the Ecological Options Network with Mary Beth Brangan. The EON feature documentary S.O.S. – The San Onofre Syndrome – Nuclear Power’s Legacy will be released later this year.

Photo: HoltecInternational.com

By James Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan – EON
Crossposted on Substack

Holtec: A Company On A Roll with Global Reach
Holtec International is a private, multi-national company founded in 1986 by its President and CEO Dr. Kris Singh. Today, according to its website, Holtec boasts “a business footprint in eighteen countries on five continents.”

Credit: HoltecInternational.com

With a seeming aim at both vertical and horizontal monopolies, its divisions have fingers in a number of related areas including manufacturing of nuclear plant components; nuclear fuel and waste management system components and locations; decommissioning of shuttered nuclear power plants; and development of small modular reactors (SMRs).

A Formidable Corporate Rap Sheet

During its decades-long rise to global reach under Dr. Singh’s autocratic rule the company has developed a reputation including bribery, poor quality control, financial fraud, abuse of labor rights and running roughshod over the informed democratic choices of citizens impacted by its actions.

We reported on some of Holtec transgressions in a 2019 Counterpunch article, Halting Holtec – A Challenge for Nuclear Safety Advocates, and updated in 2020 in Holtec Faces Opposition on NoNukesCA.net.

Since then Holtec has been up to more mischief. In its decommissioning activities in it takes ownership of shuttered nuclear power plants, thus gaining access to the massive decommissioning trust funds amassed over decades from ratepayers’ contributions.

Indian-Point-(Holtec)-world-nuclear-news.org

Its projects include Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station on Cape Cod Bay and Indian Point near New York City on the Hudson. At Pilgrim, the company has alarmed regional residents by announcing plans to dump over a million gallons of radioactive wastewater into Cape Cod Bay. As part of its decommissioning plan at Indian Point, Holtec has proposed dumping up to one million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Hudson as early as this August.

Pilgrim – wbur.org

Readers will note that this repeats a pattern seen at the international level. NPR reports,

“The International Atomic Energy Agency has approved a plan by Japan to release more than a million tons of treated nuclear waste water from the destroyed Fukushima power plant into the ocean, despite vehement international opposition.

“In a report released Tuesday, the IAEA said it has concluded after a two-year assessment that the plan is “consistent with relevant international safety standards” and that while societal, political and environmental concerns have been raised, the discharged water “will have negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”

Elsewhere in the News

On July 7th, Amanda Oglesby published an article in the Asbury Park Press entitled “Ex-Holtec CFO accuses company of ‘make believe’ financial statements in whistleblower suit.’

Kevin O’Rourke – Credit: Holtec.com

According to a report from Beyond Nuclear, Kevin O’Rourke, a fired former Holtec CFO has come forward with whistleblower charges that

“Holtec CEO, Krishna Singh, the company, and a dozen yet to be named Holtec employees, violated New Jersey whistleblower protection law. O’Rourke accuses Singh of firing him for refusing to sign off, and put his name on financial misrepresentations intended to secure major financial investment from South Korean firm Hyundai Engineering and Construction, for Holtec’s small modular reactor development initiative.”

Kris Singh – Credit: philly.com

The Beyond Nuclear report continues,

“O’Rourke claims that he was ordered by Holtec’s CEO, Krishna Singh, to tell Hyundai Engineering and Construction that Holtec expected to “break even” during the first five years of operations of its proposed nuclear waste facility in New Mexico, when Holtec’s internal projection was actually a $150,000,000 annual loss for those five years.

Dracula in Charge of a Blood Bank

Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer at Fairewinds Energy, comments that giving Holtec access to decommissioning funds at shuttered nuclear plants is like “placing Dracula in charge of a blood bank.” Gundersen explains, “If the whistleblower is just right on only one-third of his Holtec fraud estimate of $750,000,000, the Palisades decommissioning fund will be sucked dry by Holtec, leaving Michigan with the carcass.”

Beyond Nuclear and Don’t Waste Michigan sent a letter to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer stating: “We request that you impose an immediate administrative freeze on the expenditure of any of the $150,000,000 appropriated by the Legislature on June 28, 2023, for Holtec’s restart of Palisades until there are unconditional assurances that Holtec’s management is operating honestly and wholly within the law.”

Beyond Nuclear reports that, together with Don’t Waste Michigan, it had

“spearheaded a coalition letter to all 148 Michigan state legislators on June 28th, urging opposition to Holtec’s request for $150 million for the Palisades restart. Forty-three Michigan groups, including the Sierra Club Michigan Chapter, the Board of Directors of the statewide Anishinaabek Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party, as well as the Native-led Citizens’ Resistance at Fermi Two (CRAFT), Michigan Climate Action Network, Washtenaw350, For Love of Water, Freshwater Future, and Clean Water Action Michigan, to name just several of the Michigan organizations which endorsed the letter. The coalition’s members and supporters represent hundreds of thousands of Michiganders.”

Friends in High Places?

As in other cases showing Holtec’s ability to end run the public will, despite this massive show of citizen opposition the Beyond Nuclear report goes on, “just several hours after the letter was sent to Michigan legislators, the Palisades restart bailout was nevertheless approved by both legislative chambers, as part of an $82 billion omnibus budget bill.”

The pattern continues with Holtec’s proposed – and much opposed – Consolidated Interim Storage Facility (CISF) site in New Mexico, which would bring hundreds of shipments of radioactive waste to the state on rickety rail lines and bridges through non-consenting , alarmed communities from across the country .

To be buried sub-grade – nuclear-news.net

According to Holtec’s License Request

• The proposed CISF would be located on approximately 420.9 ha [1,040 ac] of land in southeastern New Mexico. The land for the Holtec CISF is owned by the Eddy-Lea Alliance, but would be purchased by Holtec prior to construction; however, access to the site and a proposed rail spur would require a BLM easement.

• In its license application, Holtec requests authorization in the initial phase of the project to store 5,000 metric tons of uranium (MTUs) in approximately 500 canisters for a license period of 40 years. However, because the capacity of individual canisters can vary, the 500 canisters proposed in the Holtec license application have the potential to hold up to 8,680 MTUs. The NRC’s safety and environmental analyses will take into account the maximum potential capacity of the facility. The larger capacity was clarified through NRC’s Request for Additional Information (RAI) process.

• In addition to the first phase, Holtec has stated its intent to request license amendments in the future to expand the facility to eventually store up to 10,000 canisters of SNF. Additional NRC reviews would take place for subsequent license amendments.

Last February , the Carlsbad Current Argus reported,

“a bill intended to block a nuclear waste storage project in southeast New Mexico took a big step toward becoming law this week, passing the State Senate Monday on a 21-13 vote.

“Senate Bill 53 was introduced by Las Cruces Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D-36) a frequent critic of a proposal by Holtec International to build a temporary storage site for spent nuclear fuel rods at a remote site near Carlsbad and Hobbs.

“The bill would prevent the State from issuing permits needed to operate such a site should it lack expressed consent from New Mexico officials and if the federal government has yet to site a permanent disposal site for the waste.”

A Bad Idea, Full Stop

On May 9, 2023, New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard issued a statement regarding the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to issue a license for the construction of Holtec International’s nuclear storage facility in Lea County.

Statement from Commissioner Garcia Richard:

“This is a bad idea, full stop. Placing a nuclear storage facility in the heart of oil and gas operations is a recipe for ecological disaster and unnecessarily puts New Mexicans at risk. Since being elected Land Commissioner, I have been opposed to making New Mexico the permanent home for nuclear waste because of the threats to New Mexicans’ health, safety, and economic development.  We shouldn’t let unelected bureaucrats in Washington jam through this shaky proposal that will bring massive profits to an out-of-state company with a troubled safety record, while putting our people and environment in harm’s way.  Bottom line, the world’s most active oil and gas producing field is not the right place for a long-term nuclear waste storage site. Holtec needs to understand that New Mexico is not the nation’s dumping ground and should stop misleading the public about the dangers their proposal presents.”

“The proposed waste dump site is located in the middle of the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil and gas regions.  Nearly 2,500 oil, gas, and mineral wells or sites are operated by 54 different businesses or entities within a 10-mile radius of the proposed site. Locating an interim nuclear storage site above active oil, gas, and mining operations raises serious safety concerns. Also threatened by the site would be the billions of dollars in annual revenue that State Land Office leases generate for education in New Mexico.

“Additionally, the surface and mineral estates have split ownership at the proposed site, with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance LLC owning the surface land and the State of New Mexico, through the State Land Office, owning the mineral estate beneath the land. Holtec has falsely claimed to have secured agreements from oil and gas operators at or around the site to restrict these activities, specifically assuring the NRC that oil and gas drilling will only occur at depths greater than 5,000 feet.  However, there are no such agreements containing these restrictions in place with oil and gas lessees at the site or the State Land Office.  One agreement has been made with Intrepid Mining, LLC, a potash mining company, but that agreement has not been approved, as required by lease terms, by the State Land Office.”

Growth Industry or Dead End?

As we have shown in our previous article Outing the Nuclear Energy Weapons Connection and elsewhere, the Nuclear Enterprise is a triad built of energy, weapons and waste.

For many denuclearization advocates around the world, Holtec has earned a well-earned reputation as the poster child for plutonium profiteering. But it is by no means without would be competitors. For many like Singh, the Nuclear Enterprise is seen as a potentially perpetual cash cow.

With the operation of old, embrittled nuclear power reactors being extended far beyond their design lives, and the dream of mass production of radioactive waste-producing Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) for use on land, at sea and in space being promulgated, it might look like Kris Singh’s vision of a vertical and horizontal nuclear monopoly may have a chance of fulfillment.

But informed citizen and official opposition to the entire Enterprise in all its aspects is increasing despite slick, high-end propaganda pieces like Oliver Stone’s misinformed and dis-informing plutopian peon Nuclear Now. There are active, citizen-driven nuclear opposition movements at work in key states around the country including: Michigan, California, Maine, New York, New Mexico, Texas and Illinois.

The increasing domination of the Enterprise by ethically challenged corporations like Holtec may well contain the seeds of its own demise.

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle Co-Direct EON, the Ecological Options Network.. The EON feature documentary S.O.S. – The San Onofre Syndrome – Nuclear Power’s Legacy will be released later this year.