Spent Submarine Reactor Fuel To Be Kept at Pearl Harbor 'Til 1995

posted in: September 1993 | 0

Since June 28, high-level nuclear waste from Navy submarines defueled at the Pearl Harbor shipyard has no place to go. It is likely, in fact, that it will be at least two years before any shipments of the waste from Pearl Harbor will be accepted at the Idaho facility where it has been sent since the shipyard at Pearl Harbor began servicing Navy nuclear-powered vessels more than 30 years ago.

Already two large casks of high-level radioactive waste are being held at the shipyard in a fenced area between drydocks 2 and 3. These casks, specifically engineered to hold highly radioactive waste, contain about as much reactor waste as would be generated by the defueling of one 637-class submarine.

Navy Lieutenant Jim Fallin, a spokesperson at the Pentagon, confirmed to Environment Hawai’i that Pearl Harbor was one of five shipyards in the United States where naval reactor waste was being stored rather than shipped following a court order June 28 by Judge Harold L. Ryan of the Federal District Court in Idaho. Fallin added, however, that an agreement worked out among the federal Department of Energy, the state of Idaho, and the Navy provides that the Navy will not be forced to suffer any loss of “ship availability.” This, Fallin said, means that there will be no job losses at Pearl Harbor or at any other shipyard where nuclear refueling and defueling is done as a result of the Navy’s compliance with Judge Ryan’s order.

The Lawsuit

Since the 1940s, a 900-square-mile site in Idaho, known as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) has become the dumping ground for much of the nuclear waste generated by the U.S. governments’ nuclear research, weapons, and reactor programs. Since 1949, waste from the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has been accepted there by the department of Energy and its predecessor agencies.

Starting in the early 1950s, the Navy’s radioactive waste has taken to the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant within the INEL complex. There, the spent fuel underwent reprocessing to extract highly enriched uranium and plutonium, which was then used by the government in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. With the winding down of the Cold War, the reprocessing of spent naval reactor fuel gradually slowed until it was halted altogether in 1991. By then, the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant (Chem Plant, for short) had become contaminated and was a major cleanup site under the federal Superfund program. Moreover, according to a statement of Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus, “its facilities were at or near their end of their useful lives. Corrosion, environmental contamination, and other storage problems called their continued use into serious question.”

But what triggered the legal action – culmination in Judge Ryan’s decision last June – was the decision by the Department of Energy and the Navy to stop the reprocessing of spent fuel at the Chem Plan. This, Idaho’s attorneys argued, consisted “a significant change in the primary purpose for which spent fuel from the nuclear Navy was shipped to INEL,” Andrus stated in recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Thus, Idaho asked that all spent fuel shipments into the INEL be stopped pending completion of an appropriate site-wide environmental impact statement that assessed the environmental consequences of the continued operations of DOE and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program in Idaho.”

On June 28, Judge Ryan granted Idaho’s request. In a 63-page memorandum opinion supporting his order granting to Idaho its request for summary judgment, the judge recounted a history of the case before his court. Ryan said the Department of Energy “made serious misrepresentations” and displayed “apparent bad faith.” The environmental assessment it prepared in an effort to moot claims of National Environmental Policy Act jurisdiction was, the judge said, “superficial and result-oriented,” to say nothing of reliant on “outdated reports and studies.” Judge Ryan placed an immediate injunction on all further shipments of Nary nuclear waste to INEL until such time as the Department of Energy had achieved full compliance with NEPA, including the adoption of a satisfactory environmental impact statement. (As Andrus pointed out in his Senate testimony of July 28, 1993, Judge Ryan was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan.)

The Aftermath

Barely three weeks after Ryan issued his ruling, requiring the Energy Department to conduct a full-scale environmental impact statement for its activities at INEL regarding naval reactor waste and certain other operations, the U.S. Senate Armed Forces Committee was hearing a proposal to put language into the fiscal 1994 defense authorization act that would exempt the Navy and DOE from compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, so far as their activities at INEL were concerned.1

With most members of the Armed Services Committee reluctant to second-guess the ruling of a federal judge, pressure was put on the Navy, the Department of Energy and the office of Idaho Governor Andrus to come to a negotiated agreement. On August 9, terms of the settlement were announced. The agreement allows the Navy limited relief from the court injunction, and, while it is subject to court approval, none of the parties involved believes Judge Ryan won’t go along with it. But nothing in the agreement indicates that the spent naval reactor fuel stored at Pearl Harbor will be part of the waste transferred to Idaho anytime soon.

According to the agreement, the Navy will be allowed to send no more than 19 containers of spent naval nuclear fuel to INEL during the time that the EIS is being prepared. Before Judge Ryan’s ruling, the Navy had been planning to ship 64 containers of spent naval fuel to Idaho between now and mid-1995. Thus, naval shipments to INEL will be reduced by 70 percent. The agreement describes those shipments that are to be allowed. Eight containers are to be allowed into INEL from Charleston Naval Shipyard (in South Carolina) and the Mare Island Shipyard (near San Francisco), “in conjunction with the cessation of nuclear operations at those shipyards.” Five containers of waste resulting from the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise will be allowed after August 1993, as will two containers of waste from “688-class submarines” (after August 1993) and two containers of spent nuclear fuel from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (after July 1994). Finally, “to provide containers to preclude typing up warships at shipyards with spent naval fuel on board, the Navy may ship to INEL on or after July 1994 one container of spent naval [fuel] removed from a submarine at or near the Pager Sound Naval Shipyard. For the same reason, the Navy also may ship to INEL on or after January 1995 one additional container of spent naval fuel removed from a submarine at either the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard or the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.”

Shipments of anything more will be permitted “only if the Secretary of the Department of Defense certifies that national security is threatened by the Navy’s inability to transport spent fuel to INEL and upon application by the Navy under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the court modifies the injunction.” The Navy anticipates that it will need to obtain such certification “to meet its schedule for the refueling of the USS Nimitz.” The state of Idaho, however, “reserves its right to contest any application by the Navy to modify the injunction, the agreement states.”

Storage on Site

As indicated earlier, high-level radioactive waste is already accumulating at Pearl Harbor. The Navy-Idaho-DOE agreement acknowledges that the storage of radioactive waste at Navy shipyards is a federal action subject to the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act. However, the parties to the agreement seem to believe that NEPA compliance can be achieved by preparation of environmental assessments (as opposed to full environmental impact statements) for each of the affected shipyards. The Navy is to have the environmental assessments prepared by the end of 1993, according to the agreement.

Fallin, the spokesman in the Pentagon office of the Secretary of the Navy, was asked whether this meant that the Navy would be preparing an EA for Pearl Harbor. He responded noncommittally, noting that the provision that the Navy conduct EAs “as required” was now “being reviewed.” However, he added, “if one looks at the list of shipyards where this activity” storage – “is ongoing, it would not be too far a leap” to think Pearl Harbor might be one of the shipyards affected.

The Navy would not disclose to Environment Hawai’i its schedule for servicing of nuclear vessels at Pearl Harbor. Dave Knox, a spokesman for the Pacific submarine force at Pearl Harbor, stated that, “Our operations won’t be impacted at all” by Judge Ryan’s order, echoing the remarks of Navy spokesman Fallin that ship “availability” will not be affected.

As far as shipyard operations are concerned, Annette Campbell, spokeswoman for the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, stated: “Currently scheduled availabilities and deactivations in the shipyards will continue as planned.” Work scheduled at the shipyard, she said, “will continue as planned through mid-1995, when DOE completes the EIS.”

Campbell said that the shipyard usually defueled one submarine per year, on average. The Navy’s annual “fleet scheduling conference” would be held next month to pin down specifics of the coming year’s schedule for Pearl Harbor, she added.

1 At a hearing on the proposed exemption July 28, not one of the various parties supporting the exemption would claim responsibility for its authorship. The secretary of the Navy, the admiral in charge of the Navy’s nuclear programs, and the assistant secretary of energy all claimed innocence of any knowledge of the exemption’s origin. So, too, did its most ardent champion in the Senate – Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia.

Volume 4, Number 3 September 1993

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