“Robin Wood“:
“Atommüll nach Amerika: Jülicher Castoren sollen zur Wiederaufbereitung in die USA exportiert werden”
– article linked here with translation: “Nuclear waste to America”
photos of Robin Wood action at the Juelich site – German commercial spent fuel is stored at the site and some want to profit by dumping it at SRS
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Things are already gearing up in Germany to protest the shipment of German commercial highly radioactive commercial spent fuel, in CASTOR casks, from Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Anyone up for a trip to Germany in 2015?!
— more photos on Ausgestrahlt Facebook page
This demonstration – see photos below and on the SRS Watch Facebook page – took place on November 19, 2014 outside the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Bonn. SRS Watch thanks our German friends and colleagues for the demonstration and for providing photos. Though a decision may not come until mid-2015, opposition to the transport is strong in Germany and public opinion near SRS is firmly against more nuclear waste imported to SRS with no exit strategy. Everyone knows that SRS is not a spent fuel “disposition” site so why are German and US officials continuing with their feeble efforts to claim it is?
As FZJ says in “Frequently Asked Questions on the AVR Fuel Elements:” “In its current form, the nuclear fuel in the spent AVR fuel elements is not weapons-grade.”
So why is DOE refusing to prepare a “non-proliferation impact assessment” on the new reprocessing technique being developed at SRS (at Germany’s expense)? One answer: as the new reprocessing method poses the biggest proliferation threat in this whole messy deal, DOE would prefer not to talk about the US and German contribution to increasing global nuclear non-proliferation risk. Can such a shaky, self-serving strategy endure?
Documents Obtained via FOIA Reveal Extent of Secret Planning to Import, Dump German Spent Fuel at Savannah River Site; Public Knowingly Kept in Dark for Over Two Years about Controversial Plans to Import Highly Radioactive Waste via Charleston, SC; Proliferation Concerns being Ignored
— six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents linked in news release and at:
https://www.srswatch.org/freedom-of-information-act-documents.html
Columbia, South Carolina, USA – Documents obtained via a U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) engaged in secret planning to import and dump German spent fuel at the Savannah River Site (SRS), located near Aiken, South Carolina, well over two years before DOE bothered to inform the public about the ongoing bilateral negotiations on the controversial plan.
The technical and diplomatic documents, obtained by the public-interest group Savannah River Site Watch (SRS Watch), reveal details of plans for the unprecedented import of German highly radioactive graphite commercial spent fuel. The documents confirm that U.S.-Germany negotiations on the controversial deal began in earnest as early as February 2012, according to a letter from DOE to Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
“It is now clear DOE officials, by calculation, kept plans from the public for over two years that they were engaged in plans to dump highly radioactive spent fuel from Germany at SRS,” said Tom Clements, director of the public interest group SRS Watch, based in Columbia, South Carolina. “The plans developed in secrecy confirm that DOE has little regard for growing public concern about nuclear waste import to SRS, a risky and arrogant strategy that will likely sink the misguided proposal,” added Clements. “This scheme is nothing short of illegal nuclear dumping of problematic nuclear waste by Germany that has no legal basis under German law.”
etc.