Unprecedented shipments of liquid highly enriched uranium (HEU) from Canada to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina will begin this spring, now that the 60-day window has closed to appeal a judge’s decision allowing the Energy Department transports. Groups that had sued against the shipments decided against appealing the directive.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on Feb. 2 ruled against requiring the department to produce a new environmental impact statement (EIS) for the transports – a request made in an August 2016 lawsuit that charged DOE had not taken the necessary steps before authorizing up to 150 shipments that total 6,000 gallons of weapon-grade material.
The shipments to SRS are part of a 2010 agreement between then-U.S. President Barack Obama and then-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for repatriation of the U.S.-origin HEU. Once at SRS, the material will be downblended and sent to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), where it will be used as nuclear reactor fuel. It will take about three years to receive and process the material.
The Savannah River Site was scheduled in September 2016 to begin receiving shipments of HEU from Chalk River Laboratories in Canada. But following the August lawsuit filed by several anti-nuclear and environmental organizations, both sides agreed the shipments would be postponed at least until Feb. 17 of this year so DOE could prove it was meeting its contractual and legal obligations. Chutkan’s decision opens the door open for SRS to receive the HEU.
SRS spokesman Monte Volk said he could not discuss specifics for the shipments, “but we can say the Target Residue Material (TRM) shipments to the Savannah River Site are expected to begin in the Spring of 2017.” TRM is a technical term used for the uranium.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Beyond Nuclear, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Savannah River Site Watch, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, Lone Tree Council, Sierra Club, and Environmentalists Inc. They sued the Energy Department; now-former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz; Monica Regalbuto, then-assistant energy secretary for environmental management; and several others.
The plaintiffs ultimately decided against appealing the judge’s ruling ahead of the April 4 deadline. Kevin Kamps, with Beyond Nuclear, said it was a matter of “choosing our battles wisely.”
The groups believed they had a good chance of winning the lawsuit because of the unprecedented nature of the transport – this is the first time liquid radioactive material would travel via truck from Canada to SRS – and the risks that come along with it, according to Kamps.
Chutkan disagreed and “chastised us for characterizing the material as waste,” Kamps said. In her decision, the judge said the nuclear groups purposefully referred to the HEU as “waste” to buffer their argument. She instead leaned toward DOE’s more generic definition, classifying the uranium as a nuclear material that needed to be processed at SRS.
“DOE downplayed the risks, but we stand by our assertions that this is one of the most high-risk shipping campaigns in DOE history,” Kamps added.
The groups had asked that shipments not start until the Department of Energy completed an EIS that detailed the potential risks of moving the material. Meanwhile, the Energy Department argued that an EIS is not required because the agency fully complied with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by conducting a supplemental analysis in 2013 and another in 2015. Both concluded the transport constitutes low risk because the HEU will be shipped in containers specifically designed and fabricated for holding liquid material.
The truck route to SRS begins at the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. facility in Ontario, then goes over the Peace Bridge and through western New York on its way south. That’s a distance of more than 1,100 miles.
“DOE has been shipping nuclear materials from Canada for more than 20 years without incident,” Volk noted.
