#hanford — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hanford, aggregated by home.social.
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2025 #UraniumFilmFestival - To Use a Mountain
USA, 2025, Director Casey Carter, Producers: Colleen Cassingham, Jonna McKone, Documentary, 99 min.
"In 1982, the United States began their search for a landfill site for their most dangerous #NuclearWaste. The Department for Energy at the time preselected six sites across the country. Each of these areas were studied and documented in detail, and their residents consulted. The film, which adopts an observational yet sensitive tone, offers us a topography of these sites and their residents. In #Texas, #Utah, #Mississippi, #Nevada, the communities excavate memories of their confrontations with the administration, as well as the distress and outcry that these caused. The film travels across America goes back in time, reminding us that these lands were originally stolen from their first occupants, as we rediscover the intimate links between nuclear, civil and military powers."
FMI - https://beyondnuclear.org/to-use-a-mountain-yucca-nts-doc-film/
#YuccaMountain #NuclearWaste #NoNukes #NoNuclearWeapons #Shoshone #Paiute #WesternShoshone #RethinkNotRestart #NuclearColonialism #WIPP #NuclearWasteRepository #Hanford #Pantex #InternationalUraniumFilmFestival
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The Rise and Fall of #NuScale: a nuclear cautionary tale
Kelly Campbell
October 29, 2024"A decade ago, NuScale, the Oregon-based small modular nuclear company born at Oregon State University, was on a roll. Promising a new era of nuclear reactors that were cheaper, easier to build and safer, their Star Wars-inspired artist renditions of a yet to be built reactor gleamed like a magic bullet.
"As of last year, NuScale was the furthest along of any reactor design in obtaining Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing and was planning to build the first small modular nuclear reactor in the United States. Its plan was to build it in Idaho to serve energy to a consortium of small public utility districts in Utah and elsewhere, known as #UAMPS.
"This home-grown Oregon company was lauded in local and national media. According to project backers, a high-tech solution to climate change was on the horizon, and an Oregon company was leading the way. It seemed almost too good to be true.
"And it was.
"Turns out, NuScale was a #HouseOfCards. The UAMPS project’s price tag more than doubled and the timeline was pushed back repeatedly until it was seven years behind schedule. Finally, UAMPS saw the writing on the wall and wisely backed out in November, 2023.
"After losing their customer, NuScale’s stock plunged, it laid off nearly a third of its workforce, and it was sued by its investors and investigated for investor fraud. Then its CEO sold off most of his stock shares.
"NuScale’s project is the latest in a long line of failed nuclear fantasies.
"Why should you care? A different nuclear company, #XEnergy, now in partnership with #AmazonCorp, wants to build and operate small modular #nuclear reactors [#SMRs] near the #ColumbiaRiver, 250 miles upriver from #PortlandOR. #BillGates’s darling, the #Natrium reactor in #Wyoming is also plowing ahead. Both proposals are raking in the Inflation Reduction Act and other taxpayer funded subsidies. The danger: Money and time wasted on these #FalseSolutions to the #ClimateCrisis divert public resources from #renewables, #EnergyEfficiency and other faster, more cost-efficient and safer ways to address the climate crisis.
"A recent study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded that small modular nuclear reactors are still too expensive, too slow to build and too risky to respond to the climate crisis.
"While the nuclear industry tries to pass itself off as 'clean,' it is an extremely dirty technology, beginning with #UraniumMining and #UraniumMilling which decimates #IndigenousLands. Small modular nuclear reactors produce two to thirty times the radioactive waste of older nuclear designs, waste for which we have no safe, long-term disposal site. Any community that hosts a nuclear reactor will likely be saddled with its radioactive waste – forever. This harm falls disproportionately on #Indigenous and #LowIncome communities.
:For those of us downriver, X-Energy’s plans to build at the Hanford Nuclear Site on the Columbia flies in the face of reason, as it would add more nuclear waste to the country’s largest nuclear cleanup site.
"In #Oregon, we have a state moratorium on building nuclear reactors until there is a vote of the people and a national waste repository. Every few years, the nuclear industry attempts to overturn this law at the Oregon Legislature, but so far it has been unsuccessful. This August, Umatilla County Commissioners announced they’ll attempt another legislative effort to overturn the moratorium. Keeping this moratorium is wise, given the dangerous distraction posed by the false solution of small modular nuclear reactors. Let’s learn from the NuScale debacle and keep our focus on a just transition to a clean energy future–one in which nuclear power clearly has no place."
#EnvironmentalRacism #HoltecLies
#NuclearLies #TEPCOLied
#NoNukes #NoNukesForAI #Hanford #NuclearPowerCorruptionAndLies -
Sites with #radioactive material more vulnerable as #ClimateChange increases #wildfire, #flood risks
By TAMMY WEBBER
Updated 1:04 AM EDT, May 22, 2024"As #Texas #wildfires burned toward the nation’s primary #NuclearWeapons facility, workers hurried to ensure nothing flammable was around buildings and storage areas.
"When the fires showed no sign of slowing, #Pantex Plant officials urgently called on local contractors, who arrived within minutes with bulldozers to dig trenches and enlarge fire breaks for the sprawling complex where nuclear weapons are assembled and disassembled and dangerous #plutonium pits — hollow spheres that trigger nuclear warheads and bombs — are stored."
[...]
"Dozens of active and idle laboratories and manufacturing and #military facilities across the nation that use, store or are contaminated with radioactive material are increasingly vulnerable to #ExtremeWeather. Many also perform critical energy and defense research and manufacturing that could be disrupted or crippled by fires, floods and other disasters.
"There’s the 40-square-mile #LosAlamos National Laboratory in #NewMexico, where a 2000 wildfire burned to within a half mile (0.8 kilometers) of a #RadioactiveWaste site. The heavily polluted #SantaSusana Field Laboratory [#SSFL] in Southern #California, where a 2018 wildfire burned 80% of the site, narrowly missing an area #contaminated by a 1959 partial #NuclearMeltdown. And the #plutonium-contaminated #Hanford nuclear site in #Washington, where the U.S. manufactured #AtomicBombs.
"'I think we’re still early in recognizing climate change and ... how to deal with these extreme weather events,' said Paul Walker, program director at the environmental organization Green Cross International and a former staff member of the House Armed Services Committee. 'I think it’s too early to assume that we’ve got all the worst-case scenarios resolved ... (because) what might have been safe 25 years ago probably is no longer safe.”
#WaterIsLife #NoNukes #NoDumping #FutureGenerations #NoWar #NoNuclearWeapons #RethinkNotRestart #NuclearWaste
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So, I found this article that talks about other possible #NuclearWaste repositories (Pantex in Texas, and Hanford in Washington state). There have been problems with #Pantex and #Hanford because of #ClimateChange, and #YuccaMountain is more seismically active than previously thought! Where to bury the waste is a HUGE problem that I brought up when touring the #SeabrookNuclearPlant before it was operational. Back then I was told, "Oh, we'll figure out that problem when we get to it. Don't worry about it!" Ummmm...
Western Shoshone Nation Opposes Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository
"From our perspective the processes employed by the DOE is environmental racism designed to systematically dismantle the living lifeways of the #WesternShoshone people in relation to our land . . . It’s not about the amount of radioactivity that would permeate the #groundwater . . . The #EnvironmentalRacism lies in the very notion that it would be okay to put any radioactive material there at all."
Commodities, Conflict, and Cooperation
Fall 2016 & Winter 2017
"In 1986, the list was narrowed to three sites in the Western U.S. – Hanford in eastern Washington State, a site in the Texas panhandle [#Pantex] southwest of Amarillo, and Yucca Mountain in southwestern Nevada about 80 miles north of Las Vegas (see photo below)."
Source:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/ccc/warnuclear/shoshone-tribe-opposes-yucca-mountain-nuclear-repository/#Pauite #PauiteShoshone
#CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericans #nuclear #WaterIsLife #RespectTheTreaties #NoNukes #NoDumping
#InformedConsent #FutureGenerations