Vermont Public Hearing on Dry Cask Nuclear Waste Storage - 9/20 at 7 PM, Brattleboro High School

Vermont Public Service Board will hold a PUBLIC HEARING on VERMONT YANKEE DRY CASK NUCLEAR WASTE STORAGE ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2005 at 7 PM in the AUDITORIUM Of the BRATTLEBORO UNION HIGH SCHOOL, 131 FAIRGROUND ROAD, BRATTLEBORO, VT.

Entergy, a $14 billion dollar corporation which owns VY calls the proposed facility, ” temporary, passive storage.”

It is neither.

It is not temporary.

Once high level nuclear waste is canned and put in place, no one can say when it will be removed. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) opposing Yucca Mtn., told reporters this week that nuclear waste should stay where it is made; that is why, he says, he and Senator Ensign have introduced legislation to (permanently?) leave waste at reactors.

It is not passive.

It is, in fact, self-energized and powered by radioactivity. The proposed “casks” are actually constructed of two layers; a sealed stainless steel cannister of high level waste fuel and an outer cask of concrete in a carbon steel shell. There is space between the two through which air , heated by 36,000 watts of heat emitted by radioactive decay of the waste nuclear fuel , rises. As the air rises, it is expelled from vents near the top of the two story structure; even as cooler air is drawn in at the bottom.

THE BUCK STOPS HERE…with the Vermont Public Service Board. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides no opportunity for intervention or formal hearings on dry cask storage…so the Legislature having muffed its chance to gain even minimal protections for future generations of area people, IT IS NOW UP TO US.

Let us demand that waste nuclear fuel be stored only in the context of a full analysis of all of the risks and that Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee be required to demonstrate that waste nuclear fuel will be stored only under best available practices.

REMEMBER- Each proposed storage cannister will contain up to 36 fuel assemblies; each holding about 800 pounds of irradiated nuclear fuel, or, in total for each cask, about 28,800 pounds. Each cannister will contain over 1000 pounds of deadly fission products, such as Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Each cask will contain more than 145 pounds of Plutonium 2 39 which will remain lethal for 240,000 years and sufficient to make about 20 nuclear bombs.

It is, as Maine’s State Nuclear Safety Advisor said of that state’s dry cask facility, “Yucca Mountain…without the mountain.”