Despite chronic operational a problems and on-site soil and groundwater contamination, the Westinghouse uranium fuel-fabrication facility near Columbia, South Carolina is seeking a 40-year license extension for its operations. The facility fabricates uranium fuel for nuclear power plant but inexplicably, has technetium contamination in soils and groundwater at the site. Technetium comes from irradiation of uranium in a reactor and it thus appears that the Tc-99 come from contaminated materials brought to the site but neither the NRC not Westinghouse will yet say how it got on the site and into the environment. Time to reveal the truth!
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been pushed to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement on plant operations and is currently conducting a “scoping” process to determine what will go into the draft EIS. SRS Watch has submitted a lengthy comment for the scoping record:
“Comments on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Scoping Related to Preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement on the Westinghouse Fuel Plant in Richland County, South Carolina – Docket ID NRC–2015- 0039” linked here: scoping EIS comments by SRS Watch August 20 2020
The facility is also quietly and secretly related to nuclear weapons. Fabrication of assemblies inserted into a commercial reactor (Watts Bar unit 1), operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, to produce tritium gas (that goes into all U.S. nuclear weapons to boost the explosive power) takes place at the Westinghouse facility by a subsidiary called WesDyne. The NRC claims it doesn’t regulate the facility’s production of non-radioactive Tritium Producing Burnable Absorber Rods (TPBARs) but the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration isn’t a regulator agency, so just who does regulate that facility and the wastes it produced? The draft EIS must clarify this matter.
Federal Register notice, July 31, 2020, on EIS scoping process on ” Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC; Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility” – linked here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-07-31/pdf/2020-16150.pdf
Photo of Westinghouse fuel plant ©High Flyer