30 Years of NAWO History
The North American Water
Office (NAWO) grew out of the Powerline Struggle that
began in the mid 1970’s and raged for years across Minnesota and North Dakota. NAWO Co-founder Lea Foushee was Chair of the North Dakota Chapter of the Sierra Club at the time,
organizing ranchers, farmers and Indians against coal companies intent on eating the land and poisoning the water to sell electricity. Co-founder George Crocker was working
with farmers across west-central and south-central
Minnesota, organized as the General Assembly to Stop the Powerline (GASP) and as the Southern Landowners Alliance of Minnesota (SLAM).
GASP, SLAM, and their North Dakota allies confronted
the CU Project, which consisted of the Coal Creek Power Plant near Underwood in
North Dakota, an 800 kV DC powerline from Coal Creek to the Delano Substation just west of the Twin Cities, and the
345 kV Wilmarth Line from Delano to Mankato. The CU Project was owned and operated by United
Power Association (UPA) and Cooperative Power Association (CPA), which later
merged to form Great River Energy.
SLAM beat the Wilmarth Line, which was never built. But at
a critical time in the struggle, the large national environmental organizations
that were involved particularly in North Dakota, decided to abandon grass-roots
struggles around the country in favor of focusing all available resources on
the effort to block the Alaskan Pipeline. Opposition to the coal interests in North
Dakota all but collapsed, but the struggle continued in Minnesota. Towers toppled, insulators got shot out,
and there were hundreds of non-violent civil disobedience arrests but very few
convictions. In September, 1978, GASP organized a conference in Glenwood, Minnesota, for landowners and
communities being victimized by powerlines, coal
mines, and the development of other energy facilities. People from 32 states
and several foreign nations attended. Ms. Foushee met
Mr. Crocker, and the powerline struggle continued. As a result, even though Coal Creek and the
DC powerline got built, energy management would never
be the same again, as documented in Powerline:
The First Battle of America’s Energy Warsby Dr. Barry M. Casper and future
US Senator, the late Paul David Wellstone.
By 1979 it was clear that 27 multinational
corporations were set to carve up the sacred Paha Sapa,
the Black Hills of South Dakota for energy and other resources. GASP worked with the Black Hills Alliance
(BHA), formed at the request of Lakota elders, and Ms. Foushee moved to Minnesota to help organize the Black Hills Survival Gatherings of 1979
and 1980, which kicked the corporate looters out of Paha Sapa and secured a 30 year moratorium on new uranium mining in the Black Hills. These
actions were documented in Keystone
to Survival , The Multinational Corporations and the Struggle for Control of Land by the Citizen’s Review Commission on Energy Developing Corporations sponsored
by BHA. If you go take a look
now, you will see that the Black Hills are still there in relatively good shape. But the 30 years has expired, and the
nuclear industry is at it again, so maybe you should go look soon.
When NSP, now Xcel Energy, came forward in
1981 with an application for a Certificate of Need for Sherco 3, an 800 MW coal-fired power plant between Minneapolis and St. Cloud,
Minnesota, Ms. Foushee and Mr. Crocker teamed up with
physicist Dr. Wendell Bradley from St. Peter, Minnesota, who had also been instrumental
during the powerline fights and the Black Hills
Survival Gathering. Ms. Foushee, Dr. Bradley, and Mr. Crocker formed “The Kilowatt
Organization,” TKO, with the slogan, “You Megawatt, We Kilowatt.” TKO did its best to kill Sherco 3, and succeeded in raising a host of vital issues
that, to this day, remain at the center of debate over how best to deliver
electric utility services. In
particular, TKO drew attention to the fact that mercury from burning coal was
contaminating fish and other aquatic life as well, posing a particular threat
to Indigenous Peoples. As a result
of the TKO focus on mercury, the Minnesota Health Department began publishing
and distributing fish consumption advisories. TKO also identified viable supply and
demand-side alternatives, and a much more rational methodology for both
managing and forecasting electric utility requirements, based on end-use
analysis of electrical consumption. But decision-makers were interested in Sherco 3, not cleaner, cost-effective, more intelligent and equitable alternatives,
and the plant was authorized.
TKO was retired after the Sherco 3 case, and the North American Water Office was formed as a 501 (c) 3
organization in 1982. We set up our
own organization so that never again could some far-away outfit with a separate
agenda dictate what we would do, how we would do it, or what resources we would
have at our disposal. Ever since,
our work has focused on the relationships connecting energy development with
economic development, our environment, public health, and social justice. Our Board of Directors has not allowed
us to quit. Some highlights are
listed below.
1983 – 1986: Acid
Rain Educating and Organizing
NAWO convened the Founding Conference of the U.S.
Acid Rain Network at Grand Portage, Minnesota, in September, 1983. Conference participants
directed us to research and document global acidification developments. As forests died, buildings and bridges
dissolved, lakes became sterile, and rates of human respiratory diseases
increased, NAWO published information about the causes and consequences of, and
solutions to the acid rain problem in 17 installments of the “Acid Rain
Intelligence Report” between 1984 and 1987.
By 1984, NAWO had identified every power
plant, smelter and refinery in the US that emitted more than 10,000 tons of sulfur
dioxide, an acid deposition precursor. All 507 of them. We located each point source on a big
map, which was the centerpiece of a large convention-booth display. We took the display to “Acid Rain 1984,”
a national citizen’s conference held in New Hampshire in January, 1984. For the first time, it became
clearly visible to a national audience that specific smoke stacks from specific
power plants, smelters and refineries were causing the
problem. One highlight of the
conference was a dinner of foods threatened by acid rain, and our Acid Rain Network
provided the wild rice. NAWO published
the “SO2 Point Source Directory” in 1985, which included the map and provided
specific details about each of the 507 point sources.
In 1986, NAWO introduced “Pollution
Indicators,” which provided significant evidence that cleaner companies in the
above mentioned industries, even in the highly regulated electric utilities
industry, tended to be better managed, and therefore more profitable. In this timeframe, NAWO also introduced
the concept that high efficiency light bulbs were pollution control devices
because each one reduces acid rain precursors, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen
oxides, by about 16.7 pounds during its life, compared to using about 10
conventional light bulbs for the same period of time. The reduced electrical consumption saves
a lot of money for consumers, too, compared to using conventional bulbs. Unfortunately, at the time, North
American Philips and other lighting manufacturers were not willing to associate
their products with pollution. It
took them about 10 more years before they figured out the “green” value of
doing so.
Our work on acid rain culminated in the 1986
Minnesota Acid Deposition Control Act Proceedings, where NAWO was instrumental
in establishing a relatively protective acid deposition standard of 11 kg wet
sulfate/hector/yr. The industry
wanted a standard of 21 kg, in which case they wouldn’t have to spend any money
to clean up, and we wanted a more protective standard of 7 kg. But the fact that Minnesota established
the standard at 11 kg broke the logjam, so to speak, that had blocked federal
action to control precursors of acid deposition. It was no longer politically viable for
states to continue bickering over who was responsible for causing what
destruction where, while Congress used the bickering as an excuse to do
nothing. Setting a standard in
Minnesota forced federal action, and some protection was afforded.
1984 – 1997:
Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN)
Ms. Foushee co-founded IWN, a network of Indigenous women from the Americas and the Pacific
Islands, in 1984. She administered
IWN until 1997.
In 1985 Ms. Foushee was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Leadership award to attend the United
Nations Non-Governmental Organization’s Forum ’85 on the Status of Women in
Nairobi, Kenya, Africa.
Ms. Foushee compiled the “Native Survival Resource Guide” in 1987, which was generously
printed by NSP. Between 1991 and
1997, Ms. Foushee published and distributed seven
issues of “Indigenous Woman,” the journal of the Indigenous Women’s Network.
In 1990, Ms. Foushee was an IWN delegate to the Second International Indigenous Women’s Conference
in Sapmiland, Karasjok,
Norway.
1988: Sherco 3 Rate Case
Being as TKO failed to prevent Sherco 3 from getting built, NAWO did penance by intervening
in the rate case before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission that raised
electric utility rates to pay for it. NAWO pointed out that consumers were being required to purchase energy
from a major source of pollution, while conservation options costing about
1/10th as much were being ignored. Shortly
after, the industry and its regulators initiated “Integrated Resource Planning,”
which is a marvelous process whereby government bureaucrats order electric utilities
to incorporate demand-side as well as supply-side management options into 15
year business plans that must be approved by regulators. But demand-side options continued to adversely
impact corporate financial health by reducing sales and eroding earnings. So the utilities offered up utterly anemic
conservation programs while they all (regulators, bureaucrats, and utility
minions alike) claimed and agreed, pat, pat, that everyone was doing as much
conservation as possible. NAWO
pointed out the perverse nature of financial incentives that reward consumption
and therefore also reward producing more pollution that everyone claims to be against.
It turned out that in this time-frame,
the end-use analysis initiated by TKO during the Sherco 3 Certificate of Need proceeding bore a little fruit. A 1988 Minnesota Department of Public
Service document entitled “State Energy Policy and Conservation Report to the
Legislature” included a fairly sophisticated state-wide end-use analysis of
electrical consumption, and concluded that 52% of the electricity we consume
could be saved if people used the most efficient commercially available
technologies to perform their end-use functions. More sophisticated analysis conducted by
the Rocky Mountain Institute, for example, placed the technical potential to
get more efficient at upwards of 75%. To this day, due to ignorance, stupidity and greed, utilities and
regulators continue operating the industry with perverse incentives that limit
the ability capture conservation that is cost-effective from a public perspective
to about 3% of the technical potential. Go figure.
1989: Demand-Side
Incentives for Electric Utilities
The Public Utilities Commission finally acknowledged
that utility rate structures rewarded the wrong kind of behavior. Consumers paid less per kWh as they
consumed more, and utilities made more money as they sold more power and released
more pollution into the environment. NAWO introduced an “Energy Intensity”
rate-structure model and worked with NSP to actually design and implement a
rate structure in which utility profits rose as utility investments into
conservation caused electric consumption to drop. This structure was only applied to the
small percentage of NSP expenditures spent on demand-side programs, and not to
the total rate-base as we intended, but nonetheless it was applied and we were
full of hope, with a collaborative spirit.
1989 – 1991: White
Earth Land Recovery Project
NAWO helped create the White Earth Land
Recovery Project, and provided organizational structure and administration
services until it could incorporate and acquire its own federal tax exempt status.
1990: NSP Rate Case
NAWO presented the Public Utilities
Commission with an “Energy Intensity” model for utility rate design that would
tie electric utility financial health to the efficient use of electricity, and
attempted to convince the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission that it could restructure financial
incentives to reward efficiency rather than wasteful consumption. Unfortunately, before this innovation could
reach fruition, utilities, regulators and politicians got distracted. Captains of Industry from all across
America changed the focus to what they called “competition,” and succeeded in
injecting their version of it into several electric utility markets. So instead of incentives consistent with
public interests (rewarding efficiency), we got a mad, frenzied rush to the
bottom in terms of prices per kilowatt hour of
electricity produced, regardless of actual production costs, ecological
consequences, or impacts on system reliability. Corporate gangsters followed their
nature, and criminal gaming ripped into electricity markets. By 2001, this frenzy produced the ENRON
debacle and triggered a fire sale on NSP stocks as its ENRON competitor, NRG,
got caught up in the mess. Blackouts
rolled through California.
1989: NSP Goes For Dry
Cask Storage Of High-Level Nuclear Waste On Prairie Island
In 1989, NSP applied to the Minnesota Public
Utilities Commission for 48 high-level nuclear waste dry storage casks on
Prairie Island. We knew this was
coming, and were watching for it, because back in 1978, while NAWO founders
were fighting powerlines, NSP re-racked the storage
pool at Prairie Island for the first time. This was done pretty much without opposition, just 4 years after Prairie
Island Unit 2 came on-line. Then,
in 1981, while TKO was fighting Sherco 3, NAWO
founders were also involved with the Prairie Island Project, an organization
that challenged the second re-racking of the high-level nuclear waste storage
pool at Prairie Island. The Prairie
Island Project got rolled, but we learned a lot, including that there was no
solution for high-level nuclear waste management problems.
The pools needed to be re-racked twice within
the first 7 years of plant operations because when the plants were built, the
industry expected that spent fuel rods would only remain in the storage pools
for a few years. After that time,
they thought, the waste would get sent to a reprocessing facility where it
would be dissolved, processed, and re-fabricated back into reactor fuel. But reprocessing nuclear fuel in the US
was abandoned during the Carter Administration because of nuclear weapons
proliferation issues and because reprocessing plants caused so much radioactive
contamination to the environment that neighbors kept dying young. With nowhere to send the waste, the
storage pools filled up. But re-racking
allowed waste fuel assemblies to be stored closer to each other, allowing more
waste to fit in the pools, but also reducing margins of safety. After re-racking twice, the waste
assemblies could not be safely stored any closer together, and the only option
that would allow the power plant to continue operating required evacuation of
the pool. Hence dry storage
casks.
Anyway, when NSP filed for dry-cask storage
in 1989, we were ready. NAWO
challenged the completeness of the application and successfully delayed the
proceeding for about a year, during which we organized. With direction from the Prairie Island
Mdewakanton Tribal Council, NAWO created and provided leadership for the
Prairie Island Coalition to oppose dry cask storage, in favor of more
responsible options for nuclear waste management as well as for providing
electric utility services. The
Prairie Island Coalition ultimately consisted of over 30 safe-energy, student,
environmental, tribal, labor, legal, business, religious, social justice, and
community-based organizations.
The case came to trial before Administrative
Law Judge Allen Klein in November, 1991, and despite the massive resources used
by NSP, state agencies, and business associations to support dry cask storage,
we made the case against cask storage well enough so that Judge Klein found in
his report that no casks were acceptable. The risks and uncertainties of dry cask
storage on Prairie Island outweighed the potential benefits, he found. The Public Utilities Commission couldn't
accept that, however, and in June, 1992, authorized 17
casks, instead of the 48 that NSP wanted. So we took them to court, and won, and the nuclear waste struggle
intensified.
1992 – 1993: NAWO
Administers $100,000 Phase I Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) Grant From The
Federal Department of Energy to the Prairie Island Mdewakanton Dakota Tribal
Council
In an effort to find a willing interim host
for the nation’s growing volume of high-level nuclear waste, the Federal Department
of Energy (DOE) sent a letter to every one of the thousands of local units of
government (counties) and Indian tribes in the country. The letter offered each
of them $100,000 to educate their communities about the benefits of hosting a
nuclear waste dump at what they called a Monitored Retrievable Storage
Facility. The dump would consist of
a very large number of dry storage casks. There were 20 responders, 17 of which were Tribal communities. The County Commissioners in each of the
three counties that responded were all removed from office, some by
impeachment, before their programs got under way.
The Prairie Island Tribal Council recognized,
however, that their community would be hosting a nuclear waste dump anyway,
thanks to NSP’s dry cask storage facility. The Tribal Council therefore applied for and received a $100,000 MRS grant,
and then contracted with NAWO to administer its Monitored Retrievable Storage
program. NAWO proceeded to educate
the Prairie Island Community, and much of Minnesota as well, not only about
what it would mean to host such a facility, but about
health and safety issues attached to every link in the nuclear chain. We also began to focus on the
disproportionate impacts nuclear industry operations were having on the most
disenfranchised members of society. Shortly after, DOE cancelled the MRS program.
DOE’s cancellation also had to do with the
heroic work of Grace Thorpe, President of the National Environmental Coalition
of Native Americans (NECONA), who organized against Monitored Retrievable
Storage in each of the 17 Indian Nations that responded to DOE’s letter. In 1995, NECONA presented Mr. Crocker
with an “Award of Merit” for exceptional efforts in helping Native Americans
resist federal government and nuclear industry efforts to store nuclear waste
on tribal lands.
1992: Co-founder of
Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy (ME3)
With the creation of ME3, NAWO was no longer
alone in its effort to connect energy development with economic development and
the environment. In due course, ME3
also embraced the social justice aspect of energy development. For many years ME3 provided increasing
weight and status to the need for accomplishing the energy transition. Then its weight and status changed, and
it changed its name, and supported powerlines that
large corporations need to preserve their market share as renewable energy
resources get developed. Sorry. Way of the world.
1993: Legal Victory Over
Prairie Island Nuclear Waste Storage
The Prairie Island Community, Prairie Island
Coalition, and MPIRG appealed the Public Utility Commission’s Order granting
permission for NSP to use up to 17 storage casks to the Minnesota Court of
Appeals. We argued that Minnesota
law required that only the Minnesota Legislature, not bureaucrats, were authorized
to permit the permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste in Minnesota. This law was passed in 1982, in the wake
of the powerline struggle when people in Minnesota
were still focused on energy issues. When the law was passed, its purpose was to prevent the federal
government from using Minnesota’s granite shield as a permanent nuclear waste
repository. (The feds later decided
to use Yucca Mountain as the repository site. Yucca Mountain is located on the Western
Shoshone Nation, in Nevada.)
But by 1993, the case before the Minnesota
Court of Appeals hinged not on differences between casks and granite, or
between federal and state bureaucrats, but on the definition of
“permanent.” If the waste is put in
casks on Prairie Island, we therefore asked the Court, when will it leave, and
where will it go? As no one could
answer the questions, the Appellate Court agreed that dry cask storage on
Prairie Island would be permanent, and the MN Public Utilities Commission
therefore had no authority to site such a facility. The Supreme Court decline to further
review the matter, and thus the stage was set for a bitter struggle over dry
cask storage of high-level nuclear waste during the 1994 legislative session.
1994: Nuclear Waste
Storage Legislative Fight
In coalition with Minnesotans For Nuclear
Responsibility, the Prairie Island Coalition, the Prairie Island Tribe, the
Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action and others, NAWO fought successfully
to block the nuclear waste dump on Prairie Island until the very last day of
the 1994 legislative session. We
kept saying, “No casks!” and politicians kept putting more and more renewable
energy provisions into their law authorizing casks, and we kept saying, “No
Casks!” The bill to authorize dry
cask storage was defeated in two House Committees, a Senate Committee, and by
an overwhelming vote on the House floor. In virtually any other situation, a single defeat in a single committee
kills a bill, at least for the duration of the legislative session.
None of that mattered. Like a murderous Vampire that never
dies, the dry cask storage bill kept getting resurrected. On the last day of the session, in a
bitter defeat that is still painful, Pretend Democracy prevailed at the Capitol
and gave NSP 17 casks. The only
redeeming factor is that before the bill could pass into law, we forced it to
contain so many provisions for renewable energy that it jerked the electric
utility industry in North America into the modern era. At the time, these provisions caused NSP
to be accused by its industry colleagues of “giving away the store,” and Jim
Howard, NSP CEO at the time, offered Mr. Crocker a job protecting alligators in
the Florida Everglades.
Among the conditions, a few of which worked,
some of which got perverted, and most of which never amounted to anything more
than empty promises, the 1994 PI law mandated:
-
A
total of 825 MW of renewable wind energy in increments of 225 MW, 200 MW, and 400 MW;
-
125
MW of “closed-loop” farm produced biomass electrical generation capacity;
-
A
Renewable Energy Development Fund to be paid for by NSP in the amount of
$500,000 per year for each cask on Prairie Island during that year;
-
A
Nuclear Phase-Out Plan complete with a Worker Transition Plan, a Cask
De-Commissioning Plan, a Study of Alternatives to Dry Cask Storage, and a
moratorium on new nuclear power plant construction;
-
Low-Income
electrical rate relief;
-
Enhanced
conservation goals; and,
-
A
Legislative Electrical Energy Task Force with a long list of charges intended
to make electric utility management more compatible with public interests.
1994 -1996: Participation
in Discovery Phase of Westinghouse V. NSP Nuclear Lawsuit
While Xcel was telling Minnesota
decision-makers in 1994 about how good PI was, hence the need for more waste
storage capacity, NSP was also suing Westinghouse Electric Corp. in federal
court because the PI nuclear steam generators sold to NSP by Westinghouse were
prematurely aging, cracking and leaking. In 12 previous suits between Westinghouse
and electric utilities, the public was prevented from learning about steam
generator problems because the discovery process took place behind protective
orders. Then, on the eve of trial,
the parties agreed to proprietary settlements, and the public remained in the
dark. That changed when NSP sued
Westinghouse.
The suit started out with NSP at one table
glaring at Westinghouse at the other table glaring back, before Judge James Rosenbaum,
who commented on the snarling nature of the litigants. There we were in the back of the
courtroom, raising our hands and waving to be recognized. “What do you want?” asked the
Judge. “Well,” we responded, “if
these private parties are resorting to this public forum to resolve their
private differences, the public at least has the right to know the nature of
those differences with regard to matters of public health and safety and public
energy policy.” To our amazement,
Judge Rosenbaum agreed, and he ordered NSP and Westinghouse to allow us to
participate in the discovery process.
We were in, but NSP and Westinghouse got very
creative in the tactics they employed to prevent us from actually reviewing
documents, and from securing copies of those that we wanted because they were
pertinent to public health, safety and public energy policy. We were forced to go back to court on
five different occasions with Motions to Compel. We needed to get Compliance Orders from
the Judge in order to continue our discovery work. On each occasion, Judge Rosenbaum granted
our request. Only now when we went back
to court, NSP and Westinghouse were not snarling at each other from opposing
tables any more.
Instead, they sat together, and they were joined by INPO (Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, a
private and very secretive internal nuclear industry association), EPRI
(Electric Power Research Institute, the industry’s research organization), Siemens,
the German nuclear reactor maker, Babcock &Wilcox, the Canadian nuclear
reactor maker, and Framatome representing the French
nuclear industry. With the
exception of General Electric, which makes boiling water reactors of Fukushima
fame but that don’t have steam generators, virtually the entire nuclear
industry of the “Free World” was in court, and they were all snarling at us.
Nevertheless, we organized a small army of
about 40 people and were able to review over 1,000,000 pages of internal
nuclear industry secrets. We secured
copies of 60,000 of the more incriminating pages. These pages validated our primary fear,
which was that steam generator tube degradation was creating a mounting
potential for simultaneous multiple steam generator tube failure, leading to a catastrophic
loss-of-coolant accident. All
pressurized water reactors were vulnerable. As it became clear that we had the
documentation necessary to go public, the reality of this
mounting potential for catastrophe was independently confirmed by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) in a report published by “Inside NRC” on March 4,
1996. From that point on,
the nuclear industry stopped haggling over who was
responsible, and got serious about replacing steam generators wherever
replacement was warranted. As John
Hodgeman says, “You’re welcome.” The information we secured during the
discovery process remains available to the public on a video and CDROM.
1994
– 1997: Defeated Mescalero Apache High-Level Nuclear Waste Dump in New
Mexico
One reason the Minnesota Legislature finally
authorized 17 casks in 1994 was because NSP assured legislators that the waste
would not long remain on Prairie Island. It would soon be sent to the Mescalero
Apache in New Mexico, NSP said, because tribal leadership there wanted it for economic
development purposes. But internal
tribal opposition was intense, and NAWO went to the Mescalero Apache Reservation
to help people organize. After a
bitter and protracted struggle during which Tribal Members voted the waste
proposal down only to see it come back again and again, the People of the
Mescalero Apache Nation finally succeeded in rejecting the dump proposal. NSP simply went to the next Indian
community on its list, which was developed during the DOE’s MRS program, the
Skull Valley Band of Goshutes in Utah.
1995 – 2000:
National Nuclear Waste Citizens Coalition
After the Minnesota Legislature imposed the
Prairie Island nuclear waste storage capacity limit of 17 casks, NSP went to
Washington, D.C. to get Congress to pass a law authorizing the transportation
of high-level nuclear waste to a parking lot next to Yucca Mountain in Nevada,
the proposed site for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste dump. NAWO followed NSP to D.C. to oppose this
legislation, which was affectionately dubbed “Mobile Chernobyl.” We helped organize the national Nuclear
Waste Citizens Coalition and participated on its Steering Committee. Every year, for six years running and
against an overwhelming amount of money spent by the nuclear industry and its
allies to get their legislation passed, the Nuclear Waste Citizens Coalition beat
back Mobile Chernobyl legislation.
This work also focused on the scientific and
political bankruptcy of the Yucca Mountain fiasco, and at least for the time
being, that project has been abandoned, as well.
1995 – 2000: Worked
With Communities United for Responsible Energy (CURE)
One condition the 1994 Legislature made for
authorizing 17 casks on Prairie Island was that NSP had to make a “good faith
effort” so find an alternate dump site in Goodhue County, where so many people
wanted the dump to preserve nuclear jobs and tax money, but off Prairie Island,
because the Prairie Island Mdewakanton Community did not want it. Scattering nuclear waste storage sites
around and about for political purposes, however, is a recipe for nuclear
disaster. So when a Southern Goodhue
County site was selected, grassroots opposition formed, and NAWO helped the
opposition. This was a very difficult
time and our relationship with the Prairie Island Mdewakanton Community was all
but destroyed. Curiously enough,
the Minnesota Department of Public Service was at the time helping NSP lead the
charge in Washington D.C. for Mobile Chernobyl, which meant shipping waste for
thousands of miles to a parking lot in Nevada. But due to grassroots opposition, that
same Department of Public Service ended up killing the alternative Southern
Goodhue County dump because transportation risks of shipping waste 20 miles
from Northern Goodhue County to Southern Goodhue County made the risks of the
alternative site “not comparable” to the risks of leaving the waste on Prairie
Island. Go figure.
1995 – 1997:
Defeated Louisiana Energy Services Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Plant
Louisiana Energy Services (LES) fabricates nuclear
fuel, and was looking for a site for a new plant. The site selection process consisted of identifying
Louisiana communities with high concentrations of African Americans, and then
selecting the one with the highest. That turned out to be Homer, which is almost entirely of
African-American descent. NSP was a
primary member of the LES consortium. For three straight years, NAWO organized
shareholder resolutions that brought NSP’s corporate image into question as a
result of its participation in this racist behavior. The escalating pressure created by this
campaign caused NSP to withdraw from LES, dealing a serious blow to the
consortium. Shortly after, due to
tenacious opposition in Homer and excellent legal work in Washington, D.C., the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejected the
LES application for the proposed Homer facility because it found that LES had
violated Environmental Justice policy. LES then tried to get a plant in Tennessee and got kicked out, and now
is trying to get one in New Mexico.
1996: “Confronting
Nuclear Racism,” a Prairie Island Coalition Report
This report, covering a conference on nuclear
racism organized by the Prairie Island Coalition at Wilder Forest northwest of
Stillwater, Minnesota in September, 1995, documents
how nuclear racism is a fundamental part of every link in the nuclear
chain. About 50 selected organizers
from Minnesota attended the conference, with 10 special guests from throughout
North America. These guests
included representatives from Homer, Louisiana; from the Western Shoshone in
Nevada where the 1868 Treaty of Ruby Valley should have precluded any attempt
to site a repository at Yucca Mountain; from the Mescalero Apache where NSP
wanted to send Prairie Island waste; from the Skull Valley Goshutes in Utah
where NSP wanted to send Prairie Island waste after the Mescalero Apache
rejected it; from Hopi and Navaho Nations in the Southwest where uranium is
mined and milled; from Cree Nations in Alberta, Canada, where uranium is mined
and milled; and from Cree Nations in Manitoba, Canada, where waste repository
sites in the granite shield had been proposed. Without nuclear racism, there is no
nuclear industry.
1997
- 2002: Stopping Xcel Energy and Private Fuel Storage
With federal high-level nuclear waste
management programs failing to provide either permanent or interim storage
facilities, and after having been rejected by the Mescalero Apache Nation, NSP
- soon to be Xcel Energy - set up a consortium of nuclear utilities called
Private Fuel Storage (PFS), which sought to develop its own private interim
storage facility. PFS set its
sights on an impoverished and isolated Indian community in the Utah desert,
about one hundred miles south of the Great Salt Lake. The PFS proposal was extremely divisive
within the Skull Valley Goshutes Nation, pitting family members viscously
against one another, and NAWO worked hard to ensure that the vast majority of
Tribal members, in opposition against leadership corrupted by PFS, had as much
information and organizational support as we could give them. In the end, PFS also failed because the
opposition never quit, and also, in part, because the US Navy flies jets over
the proposed site from time to time, so it can practice dropping bombs. Turns out the Navy and the NRC didn’t
think it was a good idea to have thousands of high-level nuclear waste storage
casks sitting out on the approach to Navy bomb targets. Doh.
1998 – 2000:
Chisago Powerline
NSP and Dairyland Power brought forth a proposal to build a 230 kV powerline from the Chisago Substation north of the Twin Cities into Wisconsin, with a
dramatic and very intrusive crossing of the wild and scenic St. Croix River at
Taylor’s Falls. NAWO intervened, and during the hearings,
the basic question was whether the line was needed to serve local loads, or if
instead its primary function would be to transmit bulk power from remote
generators to distant load centers for economic transfer purposes. In other words, for
private profit as opposed to public benefit. NAWO brought forward knowledge gained
during the GASP/SLAM era as well as knowledge about how the electric utility
industry operates, and consulted extensively with Concerned River Valley
Citizens, the grassroots organization that opposed being abused by the Chisago
Project. The utilities were not
able to support their claim of need to serve local loads. In the end, a smaller line wound
unobtrusively down the valley and crossed the St. Croix River along the dam
just north of Taylor’s Falls.
1998: Manufactured Gas
Plant Waste Combustion at the A.S. King Plant in Oak
Park Heights, Minnesota
NAWO, working with the Oak Park Heights
community, prevented the combustion of manufactured gas plant wastes
contaminated with heavy metals at the A.S. King Plant. NAWO also worked with
Oak Park Heights to prevent the spreading of A.S. King coal ash, which is
contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, as a soil amendment that they
wanted to use to firm up soil at soggy construction sites all around the Upper
Midwest. NAWO also helped Oak Park
Heights prevent the combustion of contaminated refinery wastes from Koch
Refinery at the King Plant.
2000
– 2001: NAWO Gets a Corporate
Sponsor! What a Hoot!
As the above recitation indicates, after the nuclear waste
storage crisis climaxed in Minnesota during the 1994 legislative session, just
about all of the organizations and individuals who had been part of that
struggle turned their attention elsewhere. It was pretty much left up to NAWO to persevere with the mounting load
of unresolved nuclear waste storage issues left in the wake of storage cask
authorization at Prairie Island. While NAWO dealt with the Mescalero Apache situation, and Skull Valley
and LES and Mobile Chernobyl and so forth, others were paying more attention to
how NSP fulfilled the renewable energy obligations it incurred in exchange for
17 wink wink casks. But we were watching, and attended the
parties NSP threw when it proudly dedicated various deployments of the required
wind generation capacity, while loudly proclaiming its leadership status among
electric utilities regarding renewable energy development.
We were intrigued when Zond Wind,
the company to which NSP nefariously awarded the contract to develop the first
installments of the mandated wind, got bought out by ENRON, which set up ENRON
Wind as a wholly owned subsidiary to feed NSP the mandated wind power. NAWO therefore went to visit with ENRON
Wind a couple times, and informed ENRON Wind people of our role in making possible
the business opportunities they was enjoying in Southwest Minnesota, and we
asked for financial support so we could keep working. Imagine our surprise when ENRON Wind
agreed to support NAWO to the tune of $1,000 a month for 2 years! They even sent us Christmas cards! Of course, before the two years were up,
the criminals at ENRON got busted and GE, now of Fukushima fame, bought out
ENRON Wind. ENRON Wind was the only
remnant of ENRON that sold for anything approaching actual market value.
1999 – 2005:
Working With Save Our Unique Lands (SOUL) in Wisconsin and Minnesota Against the
Arrowhead-Weston 345 kV Powerline
The Arrowhead-Weston Powerline is another instance in which power companies claimed a need for transmission to
serve local loads, while the real reason for the additional transmission
capacity was to provide for bulk-power economic transfers in less regulated wholesale
electric markets. In this case, hydro-electric generators on the Churchill Nelson River
System in Northern Manitoba are the primary source of power. Massive dams turned pristine boreal
forests into ecological slums, devastating the Cree People who have lived there
for thousands of years. The mess was
massive. Imagine debris created by
trees killed from flooding that is so thick along eroded shorelines that moose cannot
reach the water!
People from Duluth, Minnesota to Wausau,
Wisconsin, fought back, and NAWO again intervened in both Minnesota and
Wisconsin proceedings. We had three
objectives. First, we failed to stop
the line and institute more equitable, less abusive options for delivering
electric utility services. Actually, we did beat Arrowhead when the Douglas County Board of Supervisors
in Wisconsin refused to allow the line to cross county lands under their
jurisdiction. So the power company
went to the Wisconsin State Legislature and got the law changed, stripping
County Supervisors of their authority. Pretend Democracy. Again. Second, we were marginally successful at
educating electrical energy consumers about the desecration of the Northern Boreal
Forests and the despair cause by that destruction, all for “cheap” power south
of the border. Third, we were moderately
successful at forcing the utilities, both those purchasing the power in the US and
those producing it in Canada, to begin cleaning up the mess made by the hydro
development, and to begin the process of restitution for those who were being
abused. The Arrowhead Line is now
operational.
2000:
Organized a Conference on “Environmental Justice and Energy Policy in the Upper
Midwest” with the University of St. Thomas and ME3
This Conference, keynoted by the late Senator
Paul Wellstone, was a landmark event in terms of our collective ability to
begin shedding light on the reality of “electric racism.” In addition to participants from
throughout the Midwestern United States, we were joined by several of the
Northern Manitoba Cree Nations adversely impacted by Manitoba Hydro projects. This high-profile event was responsible,
in significant part, for bringing Environmental Justice issues into focus, and causing
implicated electric utilities to review and begin amending their operations
relative to the people and environment along the Churchill Nelson River.
2000 – Present:
Environmental Justice Networking
Ms. Foushee served four
years on the Board of Directors of Clean Water Action Alliance. She was also an advisory board member of
Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy’s JustEnergy Campaign and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s Environmental Justice
Advisory Task Force. She is also a
founding Board Member of Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota.
The NAWO program to
address hydropower, the third central-station technology (after coal and
nuclear), focused on large dams and the powerlines that bring this electricity to markets. NAWO has worked toward preventing
additional massive hydro development that would cause additional disruption to
indigenous populations.
2001 – 2002: Powerlines For Good, Not Evil
More powerlines were
needed if wind energy from Minnesota’s rich wind regime on Buffalo Ridge was to
be transmitted to load centers further east. Proceedings to decide whether and what powerlines to build are on-going,
and there are two major problems. First,
if transmission is built, North Dakota coal interests will take as much of the
new transmission capacity as they can to ship more electricity from lignite
power plants. Second, virtually all
the wind generation on Buffalo Ridge is owned by large outside corporations who
take the money and run.
Here’s the issue: The primary driving force behind the
development of wind energy resources is an environmental one. Wind electric generation does not pollute
once the turbines are installed, but to make any difference from an environmental
perspective, a very large number of wind turbines must be installed relatively
quickly. So the public organized to
mandate renewable energy development, and made the commitment to pay for
it. The installation of these
turbines amounts to major industrial development in rural communities, and
people in those communities must live with the impacts of that industrial
development. But now, here come
multinational energy cartel corporate interests intent on extracting the value
of the harvested wind and using it for their own private cartel purposes. And big powerlines authorized by public utility regulators, and paid for by the public, not only enable, but are necessary for these cartel interests to
continue with the extraction.
NAWO got involved with the Four Powerlines in Southwestern Minnesota to ensure that wind is
on the wires, not coal, and that the people who live in Southwestern Minnesota
can also profit from the wind that is blowing across their farms. We were successful in attaching conditions
to the certification of the high-voltage powerlines that require the utility to provide transmission access to smaller, locally
owned projects. This resulted in
transmission outlet capacity of 60 MW, or about 1/10th of the outlet
capacity of these transmission enhancements, being dedicated to community-based
wind power. Two projects of 30 MW
each, Community Wind North in Lincoln County and Community Wind South in Nobles
County, continue overcoming seemingly insurmountable barriers at every turn, and
may yet come to fruition. This
activity set the stage for Community-Based Energy Development (C-BED).
2001
– Present: Indigenous Woman’s
Mercury Investigation
NAWO launched the Indigenous Women’s Mercury
Investigation (IWMI) in 2001, which began by documenting the importance of
water and value of fish for Minnesota’s Indigenous Peoples, both Dakota and Ojibwe. This
was a necessary first step because fish are heavily contaminated with mercury,
polychlorinated biphenyl, dioxin, pesticides, and perflurochemicals that come from electric power plants, agriculture,
and other industrial sources, and because State Pollution
Regulators were publicly expressing the mistaken belief that Indigenous Peoples
no longer relied upon fish as a primary source of protein in their diets. While rules have been set to limit
pollution, they still allow for contamination so severe that pregnant women
cannot safely eat certain species, such as walleye, more than once a month. For fish-dependent cultures, this amounts
to cultural genocide. The
documentation collected by this project serves as a starting point for
decision-making that takes account of cultural differences, and calls for
standards that are protective of all people.
IWMI worked in collaboration with the
University of Minnesota, School of Public Health through their Department of
Environmental Health to develop a questionnaire that, with authorization from
the White Earth Tribal Council, was administered by their White Earth Home
Health Agency to two hundred families in their client base who have
children. The questionnaire
scientifically documents that those families that do, in fact eat fish in
excess of the Minnesota Department of Health guidelines, and in which the
children have mercury in their teeth, have a statistically significant higher
rate of behavioral disorders and other health conditions associated with
mercury contamination.
These findings, along with information about
which traditional foods can be used to remediate and mitigate these disorders,
cultural information that provides a traditional context for this information,
and magnificent photographs of artifacts and natural beauty, are all presented
in “Sacred Water - Water For Life” by Lea Foushee and
Renee Gurneau. This book is available for purchase and more information about it is
available on this website.
2002-2003: Nuclear
Responsibility Now!
Even though NSP vowed to the Legislature in
1994 that if it was authorized to use 17 casks on
Prairie Island, it would never ever again come back and ask for more, the liars
were back in 1996. And the liars
came back again every year until 2003, when they finally got their way. Between 1996 and 2003, NAWO worked in
coalition with Clean Water Action, MPIRG, the Sierra Club, ME3, Women Against
Military Madness, Bluff Land Environmental Watch, Communities United for Responsible Energy, Minnesota Environmental Partnership, and a
number of additional organizations and individuals to successfully defend the
17 cask storage capacity limit set in 1994. In 2003, we organized under the banner
of “Nuclear Responsibility Now!” but we knew we were in trouble. While the vast bulk of the environmental
community was otherwise engaged, primarily with fertilizer run-off, the 17 cask limit for high-level nuclear waste storage on
Prairie Island was rescinded. As of
June 2011, 30 loaded casks sit on the pad, and Xcel has authority to put as many
casks as it wants on Prairie Island.
2005
– Present: C-BED Initiative
By 2004 the race was on to take advantage of Minnesota’s
commitment to renewable energy, and it was clear that electric utility
companies like Florida Power & Light, and large multi-national corporations
like enXco, were grabbing all they could grab. Big business had tremendous advantages in
terms of developing the wind resource in at least three distinct ways: 1) cost
allocation issues associated with new powerlines had
yet to be fully engaged, and so the consuming public paid for new
infrastructure these private entities needed to extract the wealth; 2) by its
nature, big business can organize and manage the necessary very large financial
structures (tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) with minimum resistance;
and 3) federal tax policy provided big business with massive passive income tax
credit subsidies, and being as tax credits account for about 1/3 of the revenue
produced by wind turbines (the other 2/3 coming from the purchase of the power
by the purchasing utility), ordinary people who have little if any appetite for
passive income tax credits could not participate in the wind development.
For better or worse, people started getting fed up with the
corporate rip-off of wind power long before we’re even beginning to solve the environmental
problems, and meanwhile, there is minimal local economic development when large
multi-nationals own the projects. NAWO went to work with a number of truly inspirational wind developers
who were struggling to develop wind resources in ways that optimized local
ownership and local economic development, and the result was C-BED:
Community-Based Energy Development. The first C-BED legislation was passed by the
Minnesota Legislature in 2005, and it established a framework within
which qualifying projects could negotiate with purchasing utilities for Power
Purchase Agreements. Google C-BED for
more information.
Unfortunately, the analytical capacity of many in the
environmental community prevented them from understanding the need to link
local economic development with environmental protection. These individuals and organizations
stated they were “agnostic” as to ownership, and just wanted more renewable
energy, regardless of ownership. They fail to realize that society will not get enough renewable energy
to make any difference if it’s a cartel rip-off, and does not enjoy the
political support that comes with local economic development. So the politics got twisted, and
Renewable Energy Standards got pitted against C-BED and the safe-energy
community fractured.
As the fracturing unfolded, inherent weaknesses in C-BED legislation
allowed utilities and regulators to marginalize community-based energy
development. The primary weakness
has to do with the fact that tax credits required to make all US wind projects
cash-flow only apply to passive income, virtually all of which accrues to large
corporations. But to qualify for
C-BED, a designated fraction of the revenue generated by the project over the
course of its life-time production was required to
flow to local entities. This
requires judgment, and judgment can be arbitrary. The potential for arbitrary judgments
and “picking winners,” along with the profound intent of cartel players to
preserve their market share has, so far, stunted C-BED. We’ll see.
2006
Monticello Dry Cask Storage
The tenacity with which cartel interests act to preserve
their market share is demonstrated by Xcel Energy’s move to get dry cask
storage for high-level nuclear waste at Monticello. The storage pool, which is up at the top
of the building, was filling up and the Operating License was due to expire in
2010. So Xcel went to the NRC for
re-licensing and a power up-rate, and to the state for the required
Certificates of Need. NAWO
intervened, and documented how, during the re-license period of 2010 to 2030, a
combination of more modern supply and demand-side options could deliver the
equivalent amount of power for almost a billion dollars less. Nobody cared. Now we have an aging and deteriorating
reactor, designed just like the Fukushima reactors, producing more power than
its original rated capacity due to the up-rate, that routinely emits
significant amounts of gaseous and liquid radiation into the air and water, and
that continues generating solid wastes that no one knows what to do with. Detailed information about the
Monticello case is available on this website.
2007 Dispersed Generation Transmission Outlet Study
NAWO succeeded in getting the 2007 Minnesota
Legislature to pass a law that required transmission analysis for dispersed
generation. The study was to
identify the potential for smaller scale electrical generators, in the range of
10-40 MW, to be strategically sized and located so that the existing
transmission system could collect the energy and deliver it to market without
the need for new powerlines, and to establish an analytical
framework for identifying the need for new lines that were smaller, cheaper,
and quicker to build than big powerlines.
The basic idea is that the deployment of new
strategically sized and located generation will first enhance the efficiency of
the existing transmission system, and then the next increments of new
strategically sized and located generation will inform the need for new lower
voltage infrastructure, which in turn, will inform the need for new higher
voltage transmission lines in terms of location, timing, and size.
This legislation grew out of a deal NAWO
struck several years earlier with a utility consortium that wanted to build the
Big Stone II power plant just across the Minnesota border in South Dakota. NAWO agreed to not intervene in that
case (we were tied up with Monticello, anyway) in exchange for a study of the
ability of the existing transmission system in West Central Minnesota to
collect energy from strategically sized dispersed generators and deliver it to
market. This preliminary analysis
found massive potential to do so with minimal new transmission infrastructure
costs, and set the stage for the 2007 legislation.
The study was concluded in 2009, and the
conclusions that study authors chose to draw from the results are dramatically
at odds with the results themselves. The actual results demonstrated a massive potential for Minnesota’s
existing transmission system, with a few very cost-effective enhancements that
could be constructed within months, to accommodate thousands of megawatts of
new strategically sized and located dispersed generation capacity. This is ideal for C-BED and therefore
anathema to cartel market- share interests, and these results threatened to fatally
undermine the rational for conventional expansion of the transmission system,
such as the CAPX 2020 Projects. See
below for more on CAPX 2020.
So study authors presented conclusions that
denigrated the results of the study by presuming outrageous assumptions, most
notably, that all new generation in the Upper Midwest queue for
interconnection, which amounted to over 10,000 MW, would be interconnected
prior to the transmission model year (2014). Never mind that this amount of new
generation capacity is more new generation each year for four straight years
than has ever been installed in Minnesota in any given year. All this, while electric consumption is
depressed by problems with the economy. But with all this new generation on-line, they concluded, there would be
virtually no room for new dispersed generation, and hence, new big powerlines are needed no matter what. A detailed discussion of this lying,
cheating deceit is available on this website. It appears that the methodology
developed by this analysis is being applied with a bit more integrity in
California.
2008
– 2009: NAWO Participation on the Citizen’s Advisory Task Force on Xcel
Energy’s Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant Power Up-rate and Dry Cask
Storage Proposal
Xcel Energy intends to re-license Prairie Island Units 1 and
2 so they can operate until 2033 and 2034, respectively, and to increase the
generation capacity of these aging units by 9 MW each. Such operations would require more
storage casks for high-level nuclear waste. Before the Certificate of Need
proceeding required for the power up-rate and more dry casks could occur, an
Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) needed to be prepared, and NAWO agreed to
participate in the EIS proceeding, knowing with a fair degree of certainty that
the decisions had already been made. Nevertheless, we did our best to at least ensure that the record
contained our concerns regarding radiation and safety issues, security issues,
abusive behavior at every link in the nuclear fuel chain, and alternatives that
are infinitely better from a public interest perspective. We made the record once again, and once
again, the state gave Xcel what it wanted.
2008: CAPX 2020
The smart way to build out the transmission system, if one
is looking to optimize the efficiency of the system, the cost-effectiveness of
the transmission investment in a timely fashion, and the amount of renewable
energy that can be brought on-line for environmental protection and local
economic development, is to identify locations on the existing system where
strategically sized new generation can be located right now, and to then build
out the lower voltage system to accommodate the next increments of new
dispersed and strategically sized generation. As this iterative process is repeated,
it will inform decisions about size, location, and timing for higher voltage
transmission enhancements.
The stupid way is to simply build big powerlines from points A to B. But the stupid
way is exactly what cartel interests need so that they can ship more bulk power
from remote generators that they own to distant load centers. So in 2008 the local cartel utilities applied
for 3 new big 345 kV powerlines: one from Fargo to
Monticello, the second from Brookings, South Dakota to just southwest of the
Twin Cities, and the third from Prairie Island south to Rochester and then east
to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Proposals
for these three powerlines were lumped together for
Certificates of Need, and called CAPX 2020. NAWO intervened, and demonstrated, in
each instance save for the Monticello to St. Cloud segment of the Fargo Line,
where a reasonable argument can be made for a high-voltage enhancement, the
smarter alternative. The
decision-makers didn’t care. The
mainstream environmental groups supported the cartel lines. For all the CAPX 2020 details, link to www.ilsr.org and follow your nose.
Sure enough, shortly after the powerline to La Crosse was certified, cartel utilities applied for a permit to construct
a 345 kV powerline from La Crosse to Madison, Wisconsin.
2010
to Present: Strategic Energy Planning and Implementation, Energy Neighborhood by Energy Neighborhood
By 2010 it was clear that readily available modern
technologies make it possible to produce the electricity society needs cleanly,
deliver it intelligently, and consume it efficiently. It also became clear that these modern
technologies only get deployed, with few exceptions, at a rate and in a manner
that does not interfere with cartel market shares of the electric utility
industry. That’s why C-BED
struggles. That’s why transmission
development is so perverted. That’s
why rate structures reward consumption rather than efficient use. That’s why environmental costs produced
by electrical generation, such as the cost of damage done by mercury poisoning
and radioactive contamination, and the cost of impacts from global climate
chaos, for example, are externalized and not included in the price consumers
pay for electric power.
NAWO has therefore come to understand that before society
will be able to enjoy the environmental protection and the local economic
development benefits that modern technologies are capable of providing,
electricity consumers must become knowledgeable enough, and organized enough to
identify and secure their own interest as electric utility services get
delivered. Toward this end,
strategic energy planning provides opportunities to become knowledgeable. Strategic energy planning begins with
understanding how electricity is used, end-use by end-use,
sector by sector, throughout an Energy Neighborhood. It then becomes possible to
systematically identify energy efficiency opportunities and to identify the
amounts of energy that are required at specific locations within the Energy
Neighborhood. Once energy
requirements are understood, it becomes possible to strategically develop
locally available renewable energy resources to meet an ever
increasing portion of that requirement.
Defining an Energy Neighborhood, which could be the
footprint of an electrical substation in a rural or small town setting, or a
designated number of city blocks or a neighborhood within a more urban setting,
makes it possible for people to get to know their energy neighbors. Energy neighbors can then organize to implement
their strategic energy plan.
NAWO is working with people in several communities to
institute this type of energy management, with the hope that it will enable the
modern energy technologies to be deployed much more rapidly, and in a
time-frame that is much sooner than if deployment is left to conventional
decision-making within the electric utility industry.
Mid
1990’s to Present: NAWO’s “Right to Know” Campaign Regarding Routine
Radioactive Releases from Nuclear Power Plants
Nuclear power plants explode Uranium 235 atoms to produce
heat to boil water to make steam that spins turbines to generate
electricity. When U 235 atoms
explode, two or three main chunks and a bunch of debris is typically created, along with a lot of heat. During a chain reaction of exploding
U235 atoms, between the chunks and debris, every element on the Periodic Chart,
and all of their radioactive sons and daughters are produced at some
level. When we’re talking about
high-level nuclear waste, we’re almost always talking about the solid
waste. But included in the Periodic
Chart are liquids and gasses. These
gaseous and liquid fission products are also high-level nuclear waste, but instead
of collecting these wastes and carefully managing them and arguing with each
other over how to care for them for the required millennium, we simply contain
them for a little while and then release them into the air and water. These routine releases happen
continuously and in batches, and they are reported to the NRC. The reports identify each species of
radionuclide that is released, and the curie count of each species that is released. Every year, every nuclear reactor is
responsible for the release of at least tens, often hundreds, and sometimes
thousands of curies. One curie equals
37 billion atomic disintegrations per second.
Up until 2005, there was an ongoing debate in the scientific
community regarding what the level of exposure to ionizing radiation was, below
which there were no adverse biological consequences. In June, 2005,
the National Academy of Sciences came out with its BEIR VII Report (Biological
Effects of Ionizing Radiation) in which it firmly concluded that there was no
such level of exposure. In other
words, there is no safe dose. Every
biological exposure to the energy emitted when an atom disintegrates increases
the chances for biological harm in the form of cancers and mutations.
There was strong scientific evidence much earlier that this
was the case. Based on that
evidence, in 1994, in the wake of the Prairie Island defeat, NAWO raised money
to purchase 10 air filters that were capable of trapping radio
nuclides, and we placed them at strategic locations in the river valley around
Prairie Island. We did this with
the presumption that we would be able to raise the money needed to analyze the
filters in a laboratory to see if any “fingerprint” radionuclide might be
present. But this lab work is
expensive, and unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in raising the necessary
funds.
Nevertheless, we retained the notion that the public has the
right to know if it is being exposed to agents that are, or can reasonably be
expected to cause harm. The next
opportunity we recognized to act on this notion was in 2008, when we actually
were able to get the Minnesota House of Representatives to pass a bill that
would require radiation monitoring sophisticated enough to define the
dispersion pattern of reported radiation releases. Unfortunately, we lost this legislation
during the Conference Committee.
Then Fukushima blew up in March, 2011. While it has been clearly
evident for years that technologies exist that are capable of tracking minute
quantities of radioactive materials over vast distances of time and space with precise
detail, Fukushima events demonstrated such capabilities beyond all doubt and
with great public visibility.
Here’s the deal: all reactors routinely release reported
amounts of ionizing radiation into the air and water; no exposure to ionizing radiation
is safe, and every exposure increases the risk of biological damage; and technologies
exist to document the presence of radioactive materials with exquisite
precision. The public has a right
to know.
Society has decided that it will utilize nuclear power, just
as it has decided that it will use automobiles with the resulting 50,000 or so
deaths per year in the US. But
there are signs out on the highway, and highways are utilized with an
understanding of the risks involved, and the public is routinely informed of
those risks. We must make it be the
same with nuclear power. The public
has a right to know.
NAWO has formally informed the NRC that it is obligated to
provide the public with information that defines radiation dispersion patterns
at every reactor in real time, and over time. NRC staff agrees that no radiation dose
is safe, that the technology exists to precisely track radiation, and that
every reactor routinely releases radiation. We are waiting to hear back from the NRC
as to why it cannot provide the public with “right to know” information. But to NAWO, it seems clear that the
public has a right to know the definition of the dispersion plume of
radioactive releases from each reactor site in real time, and to know the
definition of that plume over time. If you agree, contact the NRC and tell them so.