Grant Merritt weighs in on nuclear
April 14th, 2022
Grant Merritt in the STrib:
Counterpoint: Case still powerful against nuclear energy
It would be unsafe and costly for Minnesota to reverse the moratorium.
By Grant J. Merritt April 13, 2022
In response to “Times change. Minnesota nuclear moratorium must end” (Opinion Exchange, April 11), there are five reasons to retain Minnesota’s moratorium on building any more fission nuclear power plants.
The first is that ever since the Atomic Energy Commission began promoting them back in the post-World War II days, and over the ensuing 75 years, no acceptable storage locations have been found for the radioactive wastes.
The second reason is that these plants are prone to accidents, such as we had at the Monticello NSP nuclear plant on Nov. 19, 1971, when 50,000 gallons of radioactive water flowed into the Mississippi River. This caused the commissioner of the Minnesota Health Department to close the water intakes in the metro due to the threat to human health. That catapulted the accident into national news. Serious accidents occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant followed by the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plants.
The third reason to oppose any more of these plants here or elsewhere in the U.S. is the threat of terrorism, now being experienced at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
The fourth reason is that licensing nukes is difficult due to opposition by many people, even though the U.S. government has preempted state regulation of potential exposure to water discharges. Thanks to action by former Gov. Wendell Anderson when he was a U.S. senator, air emissions are not preempted, so the state can hold hearings on air emission permits, which would no doubt be hotly opposed.
The final reason for continuing the moratorium is that building nuclear power plants is so excessively costly that the nuclear plant that was well underway to being built on the Savannah River in South Carolina was abandoned by voters.
For these reasons the Minnesota Legislature should not reverse the nuclear moratorium.
Grant J. Merritt, of New Hope, is a retired attorney. He was executive director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, 1971-75.
TODAY! 6 p.m. – Dry Cask SEIS Mgt
February 16th, 2022
In-person meeting tonight — MASK UP!
READ THE DRAFT SUPPLEMENTAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT AND REGISTER YOUR THOUGHTS!
Xcel still has not disclosed what cask they plan to use. They also have said they don’t need a NRC license amendment, but the Xcel testimony in the rate case says otherwise. See p. 56-58:
Be there, or be square!
Prairie Island dry cask Supplemental EIS is out
February 1st, 2022
Dept. of Commerce – EERA announces release of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Xcel’s proposal to change storage casks (to what? Who knows, Xcel ain’t sayin’), and two meetings for comment.
In person meeting? MASK UP!!!
And here’s the SEIS:
Here’s the poop on comments:
Get to work, the SEIS is 132 pages, but in format-lite!
FYI, Xcel’s “plan” is linked here:
Change in Prairie Island nuclear casks?
Nuclear Spent Fuel Storage
December 21st, 2020
In December, 1994, after the tumultuous legislative session from hell, and the resulting “1994 Prairie Island Bill, Ch. 641, SF 1706,” I noticed a sign up on the window of Kenyon City Hall, looking for someone to represent the City at a Northern States Power (now Xcel Energy) group to “select a site for nuclear waste” somewhere “in Goodhue County,” away from the nuclear plant site. December 14, 1994 was the first meeting of the group, which met over I think 6 months, a most bizarre series of meetings, culminating in NSP’s selection of “Site P” in Florence Township as its preferred site. At that meeting, this truckdriver realized that the seals on the TN-40 casks needed to be replaced. When I asked about that, they had no plan. Oh my, that got my attention — it was clearly not a well thought out plan.
A few nuclear spent fuel documents floated up recently, and here they are:
NUREG-2224 Dry Storage and Transportation of High Burnup Spent Nuclear Fuel
In I think May, 1995, they started filling up casks and putting them on a pad at Prairie Island, and meanwhile, the NSP group’s meetings ended, the Environmental Quality Board formed an official Citizens Advisory Task Force on nuclear waste, with the task of reviewing the NSP application to the EQB for a site permit. The Task Force ended and issued this report:
At that time, I was spending a lot of time learning about casks, paying attention to anything that came up, with particular interest in whether casks could indeed be unloaded.
Trans Nuclear casks were used at Prairie Island, they’re also at Arkansas Nuclear 1, somewhere else to… Here’s a miscellaneous dock from TransNuclear (it has another name now):
Transnuclear Handouts – Part 3 of 6 – 10/07/09 Public Meeting https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0927/ML092790437.pdf
Around that time was the “Point Beach Ignition Event” where they left the zinc assembly in the boric acid solution in the cask overnight until the next shift came in, and then tried to weld it. Zinc + boric acid = hydrogen. BOOM! Clue: “Gas ignition event” = EXPLOSION! The cask lid bent up a few inches (it was 9″ thick!!), the wedges holding assembly basket in place blew out onto the floor…
OOPS!
And then there’s the 3 Stooges cask unloading at INEL, this is H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S:
Putting this up for future reference – a permanent repository!!!
9th Anniversary of Fukushima Daiichi meltdown
March 11th, 2020
Nine years ago, when this happened, I posted as much as I could find about it, and it was hard to nail info down, but this photo above pretty much said it all, massive explosion.
Today, the release of SimplyInfo.org’s 9th Anniversary report:
View The 9th Anniversary Annual Report Here
SimplyInfo.org, a group of talented volunteers deep-researching this issue, has been tracking this for 9 years now. From their site’s “about us” page:
Back when it happened, I put these up on my Legalectricsite, and shortly after it happened, Day 3 I believe, I had over 4,000 hits in ONE DAY! People were hungry, desperate, for information. When I’d reported the explosion, the first one, someone commented that “no way was it melting down,” and that made no sense, even given what little objective information we had. And in fact, it was a lot worse than those folks thought. I knew it was a disaster, but as it kept getting worse, well, stunning… and the impacts are still affecting us, will be for thousands of years. Right now, they’re on the verge of dumping radioactive water into the ocean!
These Legalectric posts below were no real scoop, “just information lite,” a compilation of public info, news reports, but its information that we in Minnesota should take into account because our Monticello nuclear plant is the same design as Fukushima Diiachi: