Living Without Plastic

  • Cheryl Lohrman victorious after finding a specialty deli that would sell her cheese and put it, plastic free, in her steel tin. (Photo courtesy of Sadie Babits)

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

Transcript

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

When Cheryl Lohrmann comes to the grocery store all she sees is plastic. Plastic yogurt containers, cheese wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap, juice bottles, plastic bags. She doesn’t want this stuff in her life. So Lohrmann decided she’d vote with her wallet by refusing to buy anything with plastic.

“We’re at cherry sprouts grocery store in Portland, OR where I’m going to purchase some cheese and some eggs.”

Eggs are no problem. She just puts them in her used egg carton. But cheese is a different story. She has a small steel tin that looks like it belongs with her camping gear – not the grocery store. And Lohrmann has a special request for the guy behind the counter.

“And that is if I get the cheese not wrapped up in plastic but just in this container or maybe you could put this on paper.”

“Aahhh. I don’t think we can do that because it needs to be wrapped up.”

Lohrmann gets that reaction a lot. So she won’t buy cheese here. It means a trip to another shop – this time a high-end specialty deli.

LouAnne Schooler owns this store. She explains to Lohrmann why they use plastic.

“Plastic, it’s the unfortunately simplest choice because we wrap and re-wrap continuously throughout the day and it can’t be left unwrapped and people need to see the cheese so that precludes it from being wrapped in most papers.”

But Schooler says she’s only too happy to help people like Lohrmann who don’t want their cheese shrink- wraped. So she drops the cheese –plastic free – into Lohrmann’s tin.

“That’s a good chunk of cheese. Magical moment here–thanks for letting me do that”

“Sure.”

Lohrmann started going plastic free a couple of years ago after reading Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbageland. The author tracked her trash to find out where it ended up. The chapter on plastic struck a nerve with Lohrmann.

“I think it’s been taken too far when you have toothpicks individually wrapped in plastic. You know you just start to think is that really necessary given the fact that this is such a toxic material that doesn’t have high enough recycling rights to really justify having it.”

Lohrmann also gets miffed that you end up paying for plastic three times. You pay for it at the grocery store and again to have it hauled to the landfill. Finally, she says we pay for it environmentally – plastic doesn’t disappear. So you might think it’s a little nuts to even think about living a life free of plastic. Lohrmann gets that.

“It is hard right now to feel like you can maneuver to get whatever you want without plastic.”

“Ok, so on a scale of one to ten–ten being plastic free–where are you?”

“I would say probably a nine.”

That’s a nine when it comes to buying groceries. Because let’s face it. Plastic is everywhere even in Lohrmann’s home. There’s her computer, picture frames, even the parts on her bike. She realizes going plastic free is nearly impossible but she’s willing to try to send a message especially to businesses that we need to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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A Filmmaker’s Food Waste Story

  • Jeremy Seifert produced the Dive!, a film about food waste and how much of it is actually useful. (Photo courtesy of Dive! The Film)

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.
Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Transcript

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.

Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Jeremy Seifert didn’t start dumpster diving to make a film.

A few years ago, friends turned him onto it.
One morning, they surprised him with bags of food pulled from a dumpster.

“And so my entire kitchen floor was covered with meat and salads and I was filled with delight and wonder and I just said, “where do we begin?”

Seifert says he dumpster dived for kicks, but that changed.
Seifert is a filmmaker by trade, and he got a filming assignment at a refugee camp in Uganda.
The kids in the camp had hardly any food.

“They were truly hungry and suffering from hunger. And I came back home and two nights later, I was on my way to a dumpster pulling out a carload of food that had been thrown away. That experience filled me with such outrage, that I felt I needed to do something and my expression was to make a film.”

Seifert’s film picks up after his dumpster diving takes this kind of political turn.
It’s not for kicks anymore; he wants to show our food waste problem is so bad, that his family could practically live off food from grocery stores dumpsters.
He gets advice from experienced divers.

“Rule number one. Never take more than you need unless you find it a good home.”

But, Seifert runs into trouble with this rule.
He can’t let food go …

“I’m tired of it, there’s too much. I only took this much because there’s so much going to waste. It’s almost two in the morning, and I don’t have anywhere to put it, really.
I had to save as much of it as I could. In just a week of nightly diving, we had a year’s supply of meat.”

Guilt wasn’t his only problem.
His wife, Jen, explains a practical one.

“The dumpster stuff is really great. but because there’s such a large quantity of it, it can turn to a lot of work. So there’s like 12 packages of strawberries that I need to wash and freeze and cut. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just a lot more work than going to the grocery store and picking up just what you need.”

Seifert says the biggest problem with dumpster diving, was that it changed how he felt about food. One morning, he talked to his young son about it and kept the camera rolling …

“I don’t know if dumpster diving and eating food from the dumpster has made me value food more or value food less because it’s easier now to throw food away because we have so much of it. Part of me, I think I’m valuing food even less.”

“You can’t waste food, Dad.”

“I know, I don’t want to waste food. Do you want to waste food?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to waste food, either.”

Seifert tells me that this scene at the breakfast table haunted him, because maybe he was setting a bad example for his son.

“So it was a crisis moment in my food waste dumpster diving adventures. And so by the time the film was over, I was so tired of food and thinking about food.”

Well, Seifert’s had to keep thinking about food.

His film’s at festivals, and he helps activists get grocery stores to donate to food banks.
But things have changed at Seifert’s house.

He doesn’t dumpster dive so much – instead, he’s started a garden.
That way, his boy can really value what makes it to the dinner table.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Saving Energy With Auto Switches

  • According to the EPA, sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting unoccupied rooms. (Photo Courtesy of Vincent Ma CC-2.0)

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are becoming more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

Transcript

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are become more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

In some families, Dad stomping around the house, turning off lights and yelling to no one in particular is legendary.

“How many times do I have to tell you, turn off those lights.”

Don’t burst a blood vessel there, pal.

Well, Dad might have had a point. Matt Grocoff with Greenovation.TV says he’s been poking around the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and found this:

“Sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting an unoccupied room, hallways, bathrooms, your bedroom. Drive by any neighborhood house and you’ll see eight rooms lit. How many of those houses have eight people in them.”

Matt says there’s a solution. Motion-sensing light switches. They can be set to turn on when you walk into a room and turn themselves off when you leave… staying on for a minute or two… or five… or a half-hour. Whatever you set it to.

There are a lot of different types. Laurie Gross is President of Gross Electric in Ohio and Michigan. They’ve been selling lamps and lights and switches for one-hundred years.

She says there are light switches that turn on when you enter and off when you leave, others that you have to turn on and they turn off when the room is empty. Different technology works –well– differently. Gross says passive infrared works well for pantries or kitchens because they detect motion.

“Then there’s ultrasonic which doesn’t need a line-of-sight. So, those are good in public bathrooms so when it senses heat, when go in there, it knows you’re there and turns off if you take a little longer than expected to take.”

And there are switches that use both infrared and ultrasonic… good for places like big office spaces.

You can expect to spend 50 – 60 bucks or more for a good one, depending on what you want. There are cheaper sensor light switches out there… but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.

Now… these switches use a tiny bit of power themselves… so the best place for them is in a room where leaving the light bulb on is not likely to be noticed for a while. Matt tells the story of forgetting to turn off a light in the garage during vacation. That bulb burned for two weeks. A sensor switch makes a lot of sense in a place like that… or in a closet… or a room you don’t use a lot.

Matt Grocoff and his wife Kelly are working to make their 110 year old house the oldest net-zero energy home in America. And he says he loves having motion sensing switches in key areas for the convenience as well as the energy savings.

“We open the door in the kitchen and come through the door with loads of groceries and the light comes on automatically. You don’t have to do the elbow dance.”

His wife Kelly says for her… it’s avoiding a little childhood terror.

“I have a little PTSD from when I was younger and my Dad was constantly harassing us to turn the lights off. Now, I know if I leave the room and I don’t turn the light off, it’s going to go off eventually instead of having my Dad chase me down and giving me some lecture about turning the lights off, saving energy, saving money, blah, blah, blah.”

Funny story about that. Kelly’s Mom, Jane Casselman was visiting when I was at the couple’s house… and she started laughing about Dad lecturing about the lights.

“’Cause in the evening, yours truly would turn all the lights off before going to bed.”

Heh– busted.

For The Environment Report… I’m Lester Graham.

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America’s Food Waste

  • It takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that ends up being wasted. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Government researchers recently put out a study that says American’s throw away forty percent of their food. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Americans waste a lot of food – by some estimates, almost half of the total amount in the food supply. Samara Freemark reports that the problem goes way beyond cleaning your plate.

A couple of months ago, government researchers put out a study that said Americans waste 40% of their food.

When I read that figure, it seemed incredibly high. So high that when I sat down with a food policy expert, I was actually a little embarrassed to ask her about it.

“I saw this number, 40%. Is that possible? It seems high to me.”

“I think the wasting of 40% of food, I actually think that could be a low number.”

That’s Jennifer Berg. She’s the director of the graduate program in food studies at New York University, and she spends a lot of time thinking about the food waste problem – in particular, about its huge environmental impacts.

It turns out, it takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that eventually ends up in the garbage. It takes a lot of fuel to move that food around; packaging it takes plastic and paper, and throwing it away fills up landfills.

“There’s that old, you know ‘an orange peel…’ An orange peel takes years to break down. You know, a banana peel, half a loaf of bread. All that stuff goes into landfills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s organic matter or not. It doesn’t decompose. It doesn’t break down, when it’s all put together like that.”

Berg says Americans get plenty of messages about cleaning their plates.

But they don’t necessarily understand how much food gets wasted before it even makes it to the table.

“If you think about meat. Other countries, they will consume 85% of a cow. We will consume 30%. 20%. We only eat very specific cuts. We want our food totally filleted, we want it boned. We just eat very very specific food.”

I wanted to see what a waste-free meal looked like, so I took a trip to EN Japanese brasserie in Manhattan.

For the past couple of months, EN Brasserie has hosted special dinners where customers pay good money to eat the kinds of things most Americans throw away.

Reika Alexander owns the restaurant. She came up with the idea for the dinners when she moved to New York and saw how much food people in the city threw out.

“I realized that New Yorkers create so much garbage. When I saw that my heart was really aching. We have to do something about that.”

Alexander showed me some of the food she’d be serving that night. The first thing she handed me was a plate of fried eel backbones.

“We import live eels. So we get the whole thing. So we deep fry the bone part. It’s like a really flavorful rice cracker. Want to try. You just eat it? Like the bone? The whole bone? It’s good, right? It’s really good. The bones just fall apart in your mouth.”

There was a platter of rice topped with scraps of fish and vegetable trimmings. A salad made from salmon skin. And a cauldron of soup with whole fish heads bobbing in the broth.

“The eye, it’s so flavorful and delicious. The fish eyes have so much flavor. It makes a beautiful fish stock.”

At the dinner that night I asked college student Cordelia Blanchard what she was eating.

“I don’t know. I think the idea is that what’s left over the chefs just throw in a pot, and that’s what we have the pleasure of eating tonight. It makes me want to be more creative about how I combine what’s left in the kitchen sink.”

Which is the kind of attitude that restaurant owner Reika Alexander likes. Still, she says, she doesn’t expect the average American to sit down to a dinner of eel bones and fish eyes any time soon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark

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Billions Down the Yucca Hole

  • Without the Yucca mountain site, companies like Exelon have to pay extra to safely store spent fuel in pools or in concrete casks. (Photo courtesy of Lester Graham)

The federal government had one place in mind to store the country’s most hazardous nuclear waste.

It was at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

President Barack Obama recently killed that project, even though the country had spent more than nine billion dollars on it.

Shawn Allee found that figure is just the beginning:

Transcript

The federal government had one place in mind to store the country’s most hazardous nuclear waste.

It was at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

President Barack Obama recently killed that project, even though the country had spent more than nine billion dollars on it.

Shawn Allee found that figure is just the beginning.

The Yucca Mountain project claimed more money than just the nine billion that’s on the books.

It also tied up cash from electric rate payers, power companies and taxpayers.

Let’s start with the first group – rate payers.

CHA-CHING

Yucca Mountain was supposed to store the radioactive spent fuel left behind in nuclear reactors.

The U-S government charges power companies a fee to cover costs.

Power companies pass it on.

“Everybody in the state of Georgia that uses electricity and pays an electric bill is paying into this Yucca Mountain trust fund.”

This is Bobby Baker.

He’s serves on Georgia’s public service commission.

Baker says now that President Obama took Yucca Mountain off the table, the federal government should return the money.

Georgia’s share of fees and interest is more than one point two billion dollars.

“We were supposed to be shipping our spent nuclear fuel out to yucca mountain back in 1998 they were supposed to be receiving shipments at that time. The only thing that’s been done is the fact that Georgia ratepayers are continuing to pay into that trust fund and getting nothing from that trust fund other than a big hole in Nevada.”

So far, the federal government’s collected a total of 31 billion dollars in fees and interest for the nuclear waste fund.

The next group who paid extra for Yucca – power companies.

CHA-CHING

By law, the federal government’s supposed to take away radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants.

But without Yucca, it stays put.

John Rowe is CEO of Exelon, the country’s biggest nuclear power company.

Last hear he complained to the National Press Club.

“My mother used to say, somebody lies to you once that’s his fault … lies to you twice and you believe it, that’s your fault. I don’t know what she would have thought about somebody lying to you for fifty years.”

Rowe is especially mad because his company and others like it have to pay extra to safely store spent fuel in pools or in concrete casks.

They sue the federal government to recover costs.

The US Government Accountability Office figures the government will lose these lawsuits and owe power companies twelve point three billion dollars within a decade.

The last group that paid extra for Yucca – taxpayers.

CHA-CHING

Yucca Mountain was supposed to handle nuclear spent fuel from civilian power reactors, but it was also supposed to handle decades-worth of the military’s radioactive waste.

That includes waste from former weapons sites, like Hanford in Washington state.

Washington’s Senator Patty Murray brought it up in a recent hearing.

Here, she’s looking straight at Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

“Congress, independent studies, previous administrations pointed to, voted for and funded yucca Mountain as the best option as the nuclear repository.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government chipped in at least three point four billion dollars to cover military costs at Yucca Mountain.

But the tab’s bigger than that.

Murray says without Yucca, Hanford has to store its waste on-site. it’s not cheap.

“Billions of dollars have been spent at Hanford and sites across the country in an effort to treat and package nuclear waste that will be sent there.”

The Obama administration’s getting complaints from states and industry and taxpayer groups.

The Administration hasn’t responded publicly, but Energy Secretary Steven Chu mentioned the financial fallout from Yucca Mountain during a U-S Senate hearing.

He said the administration’s convinced Yucca Mountain just won’t work …

So, no matter how much money people have paid so far, it makes no sense to send good money after bad.

He didn’t mention paying any money back.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Burying Radioactive Waste (Part 1)

  • Waiting for new waste solutions, power plants across the country are still stacking spent fuel in concrete casks like this one at the Yucca Mountain site. (Photo courtesy of the US DOE)

Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country. For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan. Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now:

Transcript

Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country.

For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan.

Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now.

The old nuclear waste plan was simple: take spent fuel leftover from nuclear reactors and bury it under Yucca Mountain.

That would have moved the problem away from nuclear power plants and people who live nearby.

The Obama Administration cut the program but only said, the program “has not proven effective.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu tried explaining that to the U-S Senate.

“I don’t believe one can say, scientists are willing to say Yucca Mountain is the ideal site, given what we know today and given what we believe can be developed in the next 50 years.”

So … Obama’s administration is switching gears, and government scientists have to adjust.

“I worked at Yucca Mountain for ten years.”

Mark Peters is a deputy director at Argonne National Laboratory west of Chicago.

“I ran the testing program, so I got intimate involvement in Yucca Mountain. The license application has pieces of me all through it.”

Peters says he’s disappointed Yucca Mountain was killed.

But he says that’s a personal opinion – he’s on board with the new policy.

In fact … he’s helping it along.

Obama created a blue-ribbon commissison.

Commissioners will come up with new solutions for nuclear waste within two years.

Peters will tell them about new technology.

“There are advanced reactor concepts that could in fact do more effective burning of the fuel, so the spent fuel’s not so toxic when the fuel comes out.”

Peters says these “fast breeder reactors” might not just produce less nuclear waste.

They might use the old stuff that was supposed to head to Yucca.

“You extract the usable content, make a new fuel and burn it in a reactor, so you actually get to the point where you’re recycling the uranium and plutonium and other elements people’ve heard about.”

But Obama’s blue – ribbon nuclear waste commission could find problems with fast-breeder technology.

In the 1970s, we ran a commercial prototype, but it didn’t work very long.

Peters says new versions might be decades away.

There’s another problem, too.

“One important point is that there’s still waste from that process. So we have to go back to ultimately, some kind of geologic repository for part of the system.”

In other words … we’d have less waste, but we’d still have to bury it … somewhere.

History suggests there’s gonna be a squabble over any location.

After all, Yucca Mountain wasn’t the government’s first stab at an underground nuclear waste site.

“It had an embarassing failure in Lyons, Kansas between 1970 and 1972.”

That’s Sam Walker, a historian at the U-S Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

He’s talking about the old Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC.

The AEC pushed hard to bury nuclear waste in a salt mine, even though scientists in Kansas had doubts.

“And then it turned out that the salt mine they had planned to place the waste in was not technically suitable either. So, what the AEC did was to lose its battle on both political and technical grounds.”

Walker says for 15 years, the government scouted for another location to dump hazardous nuclear waste.

“There was lots of vocal public opposition to even investigating sites.”

Eventually, the debate got too hot.

Congress settled on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, even though scientists debated whether it’d work.

Congress kept Yucca Mountain going because it promised to keep nuclear waste out of everyone’s back yards … except for Nevada’s.

Now with Yucca Mountain out of the picture, it could take years for Obama’s administration to settle on a way to handle nuclear waste.

In the mean time, power plants across the country are stacking spent fuel in pools of water or in concrete casks.

For decades the federal government said this local storage is both safe and temporary.

It still says it’s safe, but now, no one’s sure what temporary really means.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Is Wood Biomass Just Blowing Smoke? (Part 1)

  • President of Manomet consulting group John Hagan says the bottom line is that biomass can be carbon neutral ... if subsidies and policies are precise.(Photo courtesy of Shawn Allee)

State governments often mandate power companies to buy alternative energy.
They figure it’s worth having everyone buck up and pay extra since these don’t contribute carbon dioxide emissions that change the climate.But what energy sources should make the cut?
Shawn Allee found one is getting lots of scrutiny.

Transcript

State governments often mandate power companies to buy alternative energy.
They figure it’s worth having everyone buck up and pay extra since these don’t contribute carbon dioxide emissions that change the climate.

But what energy sources should make the cut?

Shawn Allee found one is getting lots of scrutiny.

Bob Cleaves heads up the Biomass Power Association.

He spends a lot of time pitching the idea that electricity made by burning wood is worth government help.
After all, he can’t sell the idea of biomass on price.

Electricity generated from wood had to compete with coal and natural gas and it became very difficult to operate these plants on a profitable basis.

Cleaves says other alternative energy sources are expensive, too, but biomass has extra benefits …
He says try running solar panels at night – biomass power plants run 24-7.

But Cleaves admits he’s got explaining to do when it comes to carbon emissions.

You know, from burning wood.

when you burn something you release CO2 …

For years, Cleaves could follow-up with a simple argument.

He’d just run through the carbon cycle idea you might recall from high school.

You know, you burn trees.
That releases CO2.
Then, as trees re-grow, they absorb that same carbon again …

These are carbons that are recycled into the environment in a closed-loop fashion.

This argument often won out.
Many states give biomass from wood subsidies, since they considered it carbon neutral.

The US House came close to doing the same thing last year.

But lately, biomass’ rep got into trouble.

Well, the carbon issue came up in the fall as a result of an article published in Science magazine.

The title of the article was “Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error.”
It challenged the idea that biomass power from wood or anything else is always carbon neutral.

Critics now use the article’s arguments against biomass subsidies.

“This policy is intended to reduce carbon emissions and it’s doing the exact opposite.”

This is Jana Chicoine, an anti-biomass activist from Massachussetts.

She says, sure, trees you cut for power now will grow back and then re-absorb carbon.

But not soon.

“It will create a pulse of carbon emissions that will spike for decades. Policy makers are telling us we are in a carbon crisis and that we have to reduce carbon emissions now.”

So, Chicoine says it makes no sense to subsidize biomass technology.

It’s going to harm public policy on clean energy. Those funds should be going to the truly valuable contributors to the energy problem like wind and solar, conservation and efficiency.

Well, Chicoine and other biomass critics won a temporary victory in Massachusetts.

The state was leaning toward subsidizing biomass power, but it held off a final decision.

It’s waiting for advice from an environmental consulting group called Manomet.

President John Hagan says people expect a simple answer: would a biomass industry in Massachusetts be carbon neutral or not?

“The last thing you want to hear a scientist say is, it’s complicated, but I’m afraid it is in this case.”

The latest research suggests some biomass power operations can be carbon neutral while others won’t be.

The best operations would use tree trimmings or waste wood like sawdust. That keeps more trees in the ground … absorbing carbon.

Biomass power plants prefer to use waste wood anyway, since it’s cheap.
But Hagan says maybe more biomass plants will all chase the same scrap wood.

Prices will rise … and suddenly standing trees start looking cheaper.

It’s like a puzzle, when you push on one piece, eighteen other things move.

Hagan says the bottom line is that biomass can be carbon neutral … if subsidies and policies are precise.
He says policies should work like scalpels.

But often, they’re simple … and work more like big axes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Renewing the Nuclear Past (Part 3)

  • Indian Point Nuclear Station, as seen from the opposite side of the Hudson River. A spent fuel and other systems have leaked tritium and other radionuclides into the groundwater below. (Photo by Shawn Allee

You might think a nuclear power station
would have the tightest pipes imaginable
to keep radioactive liquids from
contaminating water underground. But the
truth is, dozens of reactors have leaks,
and sometimes it took years to find them.
Shawn Allee found one leak is raising
questions about how nuclear power plants
are regulated:

Transcript

You might think a nuclear power station would have the tightest pipes imaginable to keep radioactive liquids from contaminating water underground.
But the truth is, dozens of reactors have spouted leaks, and sometimes it took years to find them.
Shawn Allee found one leak is raising questions about how nuclear power plants are regulated.

I meet anti-nuclear activist Susan Shapiro in some hills northwest of New York City.
We drive where we can see the Indian Point nuclear power station across the Hudson River.
Shapiro tells me it’s leaked radioactive water into the ground.

Shapiro: It’s not contained and they know that. In fact, their answer was to let it leak into the groundwater. For years it might have been leaking. We know it’s been leaking for the last five, because that’s when we found it.

And for Shapiro, things get worse.
We stop along the river.

Allee: What’s the significance of this place?

Shapiro: This is where they’re planning to put the desal plant.

Allee: What kind of plant?

Shapiro: Desalination plant for … they want to take the Hudson River water which is a briny water and desalinate it and give it to Rockland County people as their drinking water.

The water plant and the nuclear power plant have been filing important paperwork about how they’d use the river they share.

Shapiro: Neither one refers to the other. The desal plant doesn’t mention Indian Point, and Indian Point doesn’t mention the desal plant. And we’re looking at it … how can they not mention it?

I asked both the water company, United Water, and the US Nuclear Regulatory commission about this.
The water plant’s application was made after the Indian Point leaks were well-known.
But a spokesman says water tests show the Hudson’s water, before and after treatment, will be far below federal limits for pollutants, including radioactive ones from Indian Point.

Things are complicated on the Indian Point side, though.
To start, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants to make clear, people shouldn’t worry.
Here’s NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.

Burnell: By virtue of the vast quantities of water traveling through the Hudson, any isotopes that would make it to the river would automatically be diluted to several orders of magnitude, meaning they would be incapable of posing any public health risk.

The NRC is reviewing Indian Point’s operations, because the plant wants to run an additional twenty years beyond its current license.
The plant filed an environmental report to get permission.
But that filing does not mention the desalination plant, even though these filings are supposed to mention drinking water facilities.
The deputy head of the NRC’s re-licencing division says the agency’s “looking into that right now” – almost three years after the water company made its intentions clear.

Indian Point is just one nuclear plant that’s leaked radioactive water.
At least 27 reactors have leaked.
The NRC says “at least” 27 because the agency learns about leaks from companies that own nuclear power plants.
In some cases, they’re not found and reported for years.
Burnell says these kinds of leaks pose little health threat, so his agency doesn’t demand inch-by-inch inspections of every pipe and drain.

Burnell: The issue there returns to the limits of the NRC’s authority. We have the authority to ensure the plant is capable of shutting down safely. We do expect that the systems will remain whole and not leak. We do not, however, have the authority to enforce a standard that goes beyond what’s necessary to safely shut down the plant.

To recap … the federal government wants to stop leaks, but it won’t step in unless there’s potential for a massive accident, health threat or exorbitant clean up costs when a plant closes.

As for the nuclear power industry?
It says plant owners are trying to meet higher standards, but they’re self-imposed standards, and it doesn’t think regulators should change that.
Here’s Ralph Andersen, with The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group.

Andersen: We’ve given it that enhanced priority, but to then say that the regulators should take that on, that’s a whole different reach, in my mind.

So, the NRC says it’s not going to change its rules on leaks because it feels those rules are effective now.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Renewing the Nuclear Past (Part 2)

  • Cooling units at the Vermont Yankee power station. Radioactive tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) has leaked into the ground near the center of the plant. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Power companies hope to extend the working life of old nuclear reactors because it’s cheaper to run them than it is to build new reactors.
But old reactors require federal approval to renew their licenses.
For the past decade, power companies have been on a winning streak.
They’d gotten reactor licenses renewed every time they asked.
Shawn Allee reports one of the industry’s most recent bets went wrong:

Transcript

Power companies hope to extend the working life of old nuclear reactors because it’s cheaper to run them than it is to build new reactors.
But old reactors require federal approval to renew their licenses.
For the past decade, power companies have been on a winning streak.
They’d gotten reactor licenses renewed every time they asked.
Shawn Allee reports one of the industry’s most recent bets went wrong:

Vermont’s only nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, is likely to shut down in 2012.
The story of how that happened is unique in the nuclear biz.

Vermont Yankee’s license was set to expire in 2012 but eight years ago, a company called Entergy bought it anyway.

Entergy gambled the federal government would renew that license so Vermont Yankee could run another twenty years.

It seemed a safe bet, since the federal government never rejected a renewal application.

But Entergy also asked to expand Vermont Yankee, to produce more power.

That’s when Vermont’s state legislature stepped in.

The legislature said, if you want to expand, we want some say in whether you operate past 2012, regardless of what the federal government says.

No other state legislature has given itself this kind of authority.
This was an opening for anti-nuclear activists.

This video’s from a protest back in January.

Activists took it during their week long winter-time March to Vermont’s statehouse.

The protesters stopped for potlucks, speeches, and church songs.

Protester say they felt they were winning some support, but then they got an unexpected boost.

Here’s protester Bob Bady:

“We got a call that there was migrating plume of tritium under the plant and it was going to hit the press the next day.”

Bady says tritium is a kind of hydrogen that makes water radioactive.

In other words, Vermont Yankee was leaking radioactive water.

Protesters asked themselves, didn’t Entergy say these kinds of underground leaks couldn’t happen?

“The plant owner, Entergy, has incredibly low credibility particularly because they went before the legislature and vehemently denied there were even pipes underground, so that created a problem for them.”

The details are fuzzy, at least according to Entergy.

Here’s PR-guy Rob Williams.

“Clearly there was some kind of a miscommunication and then, uh, once we have a handle on it, we want to set the record straight.”

Entergy says its own investigation found employees did not lie about piping that could cause tritium leaks.

Vermont’s Attorney General is still determining that.

Regardless, some state senators said they felt they were lied to. Or Entergy did not know the plant could leak tritium. Either would be bad, so the state senate voted to shut the plant.

And that’s all Vermont law requires, so now Vermont Yankee’s slated to close in 2012.

But what happened with the tritium leaks?

PR-guy Rob Williams gives me a tour of Vermont Yankee.

From Entergy’s point of view, the system worked. It detected tritium in underground water.

“Right. Now, this is three wells we installed to specifically look for tritium. It gives you a good early warning that you’ve got a leak back in the piping.”

State health officials say tritium probably leaked near the center of the plant.

The state hasn’t found contaminated wells or other drinking water supplies.
Tritium is likely to move into the nearby Connecticut River, where it’ll be diluted.

As for the federal government, it’s unfazed.

The U-S Nuclear Regulatory Commission says Vermont Yankee leaked tritium before – several times.

At least 26 other reactors leaked tritium, too, but the NRC says the public’s safe.

In fact, the NRC has approved applications for license renewal at plants that had leaks just like Vermont Yankee’s.

The NRC is still reviewing that plant’s license renewal application … regardless of what the State of Vermont has to say about it.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Tomorrow, Shawn Allee looks at tritium leaks at one power plant that is across the river from a desalinization drinking water plant.

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Plug Pulled on Nuke Plant

  • Vermont Yankee Corp. is one of the oldest nuclear power plants in the country. (Photo courtesy of Vermont Yankee Corp.)

One of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants is setting its operating life shorter than expected. Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

One of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants might have its operating life cut shorter than expected.

Shawn Allee reports:

The federal government has been leaning toward letting the Vermont Yankee reactor renew its license in 2012 for another 20 years.

But Vermont’s state legislature says has voted to shut it down – no matter what the federal government says.

One reason is the plant’s been leaking radioactive water.

State senator Peter Shumlin says plant owners said that couldn’t happen.

SHUMLIN: What’s worse? A company that won’t tell you the truth or a company that’s operating their aging nuclear power plant next to the Connecticut River and doesn’t know they have pipes with radioactive water running through them that are leaking and they don’t know because they didn’t know the pipes existed … neither is very comforting.

The federal government says the leaks have not been a health threat.

The closure of Vermont Yankee would be a setback for the nuclear power industry.

It’s trying to extend the operating life of reactors across the country, since its far cheaper to run old reactors than to build new ones.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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