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Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
In a preliminary version of the environmental impact statement, the NRC has suggested that a new forty-year license be issued. Their reasons for the recommendation include the importance of the CFFF to the U.S. commercial nuclear plant industry and their conclusion that the environmental threats are not great enough to warrant denying the license.
Virginia Sanders is a Lower Richland environmental activist and Sierra Club official. She said that the continued operation of the CFFF threatens the environment. This is especially true as more intense rains related to climate change pound the Columbia area. The concern is that pollution from the CFFF could wash into the surrounding community. She added that “That plant is over 50 years old. That plant should never have been put there in the first place. Anything in Lower Richland is on low land. And with the number of flooding events on the East Coast and other climate change events, that plant should not be operating there. I’m just waiting for the day when a catastrophe happens.’’
Tom Clements is a nuclear safety watchdog from Columbia. He said that he was disappointed by the NRC decision but not surprised. He called on the NRC to reconsider its action. In an email, he said that “It has been clear from the start of the license renewal process that the NRC was going to do what Westinghouse requested in spite of a long list of incidents at the facility and even an admission by the NRC that release of contaminants in the future was reasonably foreseeable. The 40-year license extension guarantees the risk of accidents and releases that will impact the environment and possibly human health over 40 years. Unfortunately, I now anticipate that careful behavior shown by Westinghouse during the period of the EIS preparation will be relaxed as Westinghouse is essentially now being given a license to pollute.’’
The CFFF’s environmental and safety challenges emerged within a few years of the 1969 opening. Many of the problems have centered on the failure of Westinghouse to handle radioactive materials so that they would not create small nuclear accidents that could endanger workers. Many of those concerns can be traced back to the early Eighties.
Since 1980, federal and state regulators have discovered more than forty different environmental and safety problems at the CFFF. In some cases, the NRC repeatedly told the company to make improvements. However, Westinghouse did not move quickly enough to address the concerns of the NRC.
Two of the biggest incidents in the past twenty years have involved the buildup of uranium in plant equipment. These deficiencies could have endangered workers. The NRC fined Westinghouse twenty-four thousand dollars in 2004 after finding out that uranium had accumulated in an incinerator to unsafe levels over eight years. Westinghouse had assumed that the uranium levels were safe. However, the problem was discovered in 2004 by an employee. The excess uranium could have triggered a nuclear accident that could have injured or killed workers.
In 2016, Westinghouse discovered that uranium had accumulated in a scrubber which is an air pollution control device to levels that were three times higher than permitted by a federal safety standard. When pressured to explain why the buildup occurred, Westinghouse’s internal inspectors told the NRC that the company had not done enough to ensure employees had strong enough procedures to keep uranium from building up and had a “less than question” attitude about procedures to prevent a nuclear accident.
Two years later, a leak of uranium through a hole in the floor of the plant brought a barrage of complaints about Westinghouse. The discovery of the leak led to finding that some groundwater pollution on the site had been known by the company for years but never reported to federal or state regulators.