Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
6/12/2015
The proposed shipment of a batch of German highly enriched uranium to the Savannah River Site would violate both German and European law, according to a complaint Greenpeace Germany filed this week with the European Commission attempting to stop the plan. The 900 kilograms of U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium comes in the form of graphite spheres from the AVR gas-cooled reactor at Germany’s Juelich Research Center. The Department of Energy and the German government have proposed to process the material at Savannah River’s H-Canyon facility. However, activists claim the shipments would violate laws requiring waste generated in Germany to be disposed of in that country. “We know the plans were illegal under German federal and state law, this legal opinion confirms that German plans to dump nuclear waste on the people and environment of South Carolina also violates international law,” Heinz Smital, a Greenpeace nuclear expert, said in a statement. “Germany must deal with its own nuclear waste in Germany – the plans to export to the U.S. must be scrapped.”
The HEU spheres have been considered difficult to process in the past, but a recent study by Savannah River National Laboratory has found a way to handle them by running the spheres through H-Canyon. Initial investigations at SRNL began in 2013 under a $1.5 million grant from Germany and was furthered by an $8.5 million work for others agreement in 2014. The proposal to process the material at Savannah River is one of several international missions DOE is considering for the H-Canyon facility. However, the plans have garnered pushback in both Germany and South Carolina, where last summer Governor Nikki Haley (R) also questioned the proposal.
The German activists claim that the fuel resulted from commercial activities—requiring disposal in Germany—while DOE has said that it is “research reactor” material. The processing proposal has also raised proliferation concerns among activists. “The fact that the plan also involves developing new technology that would permit the separation of fissile uranium from this type of fuel is a further reason the German governments need to kill this project immediately. The last thing the world needs is more bomb grade fissile material,” Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany, said in a statement.
Environmental Assessment Delayed
In May 2014, DOE began to prepare an environmental assessment for the potential acceptance of the German material. In January, DOE officials said they expected to have a draft EA completed by “early spring” 2015 with a final EA this summer, however so far neither the draft nor final reports have been released. DOE officials have emphasized that no final decision will be made on accepting the material until the environmental report is completed. “Additional information was required from the parties involved with the EA that was not available until May. The Department is currently reviewing the Draft EA and expects it to be released for public comment this summer,” DOE Savannah River spokesman Jim Giusti said in a written response this week.
SRS Activist Clements: ‘Deal May Be Falling Apart’
Savannah River activist Tom Clements, of the advocacy group SRS Watch, sees the delay in completing the environmental report as a sign of trouble for the proposal. DOE officials have told him that no DOE legal analysis was prepared for the project. “In spite of analyses in Germany determining that the export is illegal under German law and European Union regulations, it comes as a surprise that DOE has been sloppy in its work and not even bothered to prepare its own legal analysis of the proposal,” Clements said in a statement. “The deal may well be falling apart now that its run into the realities of German law.”
