Commentary on the commentary...

A little over a week ago I got a personal email from Bettina Fest at the Union of Concerned Scientists.  I joined UCS a few years ago, and have been following their reports on nuclear safety closely since the Fukushima disaster.  I am sure I checked a box on a web page somewhere to let them know that this was once of my concerns.  So they were contacting me to see if I would write a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune.  Sure, but how about an op-ed instead, I asked.

 Since Fukushima, I have been learning a lot about Minnesota's nuclear power plants, both of which are on the Mississippi River.  That we are stockpiling nuclear waste at these plants seems just crazy to me: in the post-Fukushima world, I would hope that the NRC would be looking hard at plants that are particularly disaster-prone.  And to me, the plant at Prairie Island (2 reactors there), which is essentially an island in the middle of the river, seems pretty disaster prone.  Rivers flood.  Levees break.  What else do we need to know?  Oh, that some 300 member of the Prairie Island Indian Community live within a few hundred meters of the plants and the storage casks.  And also this: that in the past 50 years, precipitation AND flooding events in the upper Mississippi watershed have become increasingly intense.  And the global climate models predict more of the same. 

So I had a bit to add to the UCS's main talking point, which was that, at the very least, we should be storing nuclear waste in dry storage casks rather than the spent fuel pools where it is initially stored.

The piece was published in the Star Tribune last Wednesday.  Since I signed an agreement that says the content is still my own, I can paste it here.
BTW, this isn't quite the version that made it into the Strib.  This version has some errors corrected that unfortunately made it into print.  The link to the print version is
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/169385856.html



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Minnesota has a nuclear waste storage problem. The problem is simply stated: we currently generate radioactive wastes at our nuclear power plants at Monticello and Prairie Island, but we have no viable plan for long-term storage of that waste.  In other words, every time Minnesotans flip on the light switch, more nuclear waste is produced.  And for the foreseeable future, there is nowhere for that nuclear waste to go.

From the 1980’s to 2008, the U.S. government had a working plan to move nuclear waste from the plants where it is generated to a permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But in 2008, the Yucca Mountain development ended.  One of the key factors in the closure of Yucca Mountain repository involved clear scientific evidence that underground storage location was not geologically isolated from the surface environment.  This flaw in the repository design is often overlooked in discussion of the political factors for its closure. Until another, more appropriate geological repository can be developed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s plan is to continue to store spent nuclear fuel at the plants where it is generated.

A September 3 Star Tribune article about nuclear waste storage quotes Prairie Island Indian Community secretary Ron Johnson saying that spent fuel “was supposed to have been removed in the 1990s. We translate that to mean [the Prairie Island site] is probably more of a permanent storage facility."

The problem isn’t unique to Minnesota: nuclear power plants all over the US now store nuclear waste on site. But, and this is a big one, the majority of our power plants weren’t designed or located in places that make sense for long-term storage of nuclear waste.  Both of Minnesota’s nuclear facilities are on the Mississippi River.  Building the plants along the river made sense: the river water can be used for cooling the spent fuel and steam.  But by their very nature, the Mississippi River’s floodplains are hazard-prone: rivers do flood.  Particularly after the destruction of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant by major tsunami, we need to give careful thought to where and how we store nuclear waste.  In a post-Fukushima world, it is difficult to believe that Minnesota’s nuclear facilities are entirely disaster-proof.

Until a suitable permanent waste repository can be found and developed, we may be stuck with on-site storage, but we can take important steps to minimize the risks.  Currently, we manage nuclear wastes in two stages. Waste is initially cooled and stored in spent fuel pools.  This waste is eventually transferred to and sealed in steel and concrete containers called dry casks.  The Prairie Island and Monticello plants use both methods.

Each method has a key advantage: at operating power plants, storage in spent fuel pools is less expensive, while dry cask storage is far safer.  The casks are less vulnerable to hazards such as fire, flooding, or even earthquakes and tsunamis. At Fukushima, none of the released radiation came from wastes stored in dry casks.

According to the September 3 article, the Prairie Island Indian Community has concerns about the longevity of the dry casks.  But the casks represent a much better alternative than storage in pools, and moving waste to cask storage is a necessary step before the waste can be moved offsite.  The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-partisan scientific organization, sees dry cask storage as one of the most obvious means of nuclear risk reduction.

This week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on a bill to implement recommendations of President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.  Unfortunately, neither the Blue Ribbon Commission’s report nor the bill convey the importance of transferring spent fuel waste to dry cask storage. 

This is where Minnesota can make a difference.  Senator Al Franken sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and has the opportunity to make important policy recommendations that would accelerate the process of moving spent fuel to safer storage systems.  Ideally, Senator Franken can also urge the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reduce the risks to the Prairie Island Indian Community by moving waste quickly from the Mississippi River floodplain.  Dry cask storage is the essential first step.

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Big Birds

Narration to follow. 

Ten years ago last spring

4/22/01

Spring Floods

Here is another thing a Midwesterner knows.  After an evening thunderstorm, the cool air will have a specific smell.  A weather man may tell you this is the smell of ozone, or of damp earth, but a Midwesterner will know the smell for what it is.  It is the smell of earthworms, flushed up from the soil by the rain. 

After the storm, children may come out to splash and play and sing, cool for the first evening in days.  Their parents may come out too, in town calling to neighbors from porch to porch.  And even through the dimmest twilight, after the storm, the birds will sing to each other urgently, as if they have been held back from singing to each other all their lives, and now there is suddenly so much to sing about.   Tonight, I imagine they are singing about worms.

The creeks will rise, and water will not so much flood their banks as that the banks will become some deep, small part of the creek.  When the banks reappear they will be new black earth, not the pale yellow straw they were before.   Where the creeks were ditched straight, across the fields, they will reappear like curled peels, dark black across the corn-stubbled fields, loosened from their straight lines by the rush of the flood.

The creeks will rise, and then, if the ground is still frozen and the rains melt the snow and then they keep coming, rivers will begin to rise too. 

When the rivers flood, you still know where the banks are.  The cottonwoods that line the banks may now stand hip deep in water, but they hold their places for a long time, until the twisting flow of the river pulls the banks out from under them and then pulls them down too.  What is harder to know is where the road has gotten to.   

This spring, all the conditions were set up by February for the hydrologists to predict April floods, and sure enough here they are.  Late winter and early spring have been cold, and thick drifts of snow were still standing on the edges of roadsides and in the north-facing swales of the glacial moraine.  Ice out is later than anyone can remember, and although the fishermen had to have their icehouses off the lakes by early March, they would have been plenty safe for another four weeks.  When the rain started, the ground was still frozen, the rivers edges still held some ice,

The Cannon River, hydrologically flashy as it is, flooded quickly after the rains.  By April 8, it was over its banks, onto the fields and the river-edge roads, over the lower trail in the arboretum, and 2 feet deep over the college’s baseball field and over the old municipal lot.  College kids went canoeing on the baseball field, a friend who lives on the flood plain tells me that a Hmong family was wading across the old municipal lot and caught a half-dozen carp, bare-handed.  The lawyer who was soon to open a new bar on his riverfront patio had a major set-back – the bar will be a pool of muddy water for another three weeks.

But two weeks later, the excitement is mostly over for the Cannon.  At least for now.  Yesterday Ginger and I walked through the arboretum, me trying to stay on the upper trails, Ginger seeing, or smelling, the ponds on the floodplain and plunging down the steep hill to go swim and roll in the mud-and-algae soup.  At the Iron Bridge, the floodplain is full of sand dunes, attesting to the river’s disregard for its banks last week. The dunes form gray sandy arcs across the black soil, each holding a puddle in its arc.  Migrating plovers filled the puddles, but flew off in a white-rumped flock everytime a car crossed the bridge, or of course, every time Ginger came near. 

Yesterday and today, the Cannon through town was decidedly back in its banks.  But today’s steady drizzle and tonight’s thunderstorms will bring the Cannon back up, maybe as early as tomorrow morning.  How far up?  Wait and see. Neither the USGS nor the state monitor data or provide forecasts for the upper Cannon, so it’s anyone’s guess.

While the Cannon rose and fell again quickly, the Minnesota River has crested slowly, and more dangerously, and has stayed high over the last two weeks.  Official crest in Mankato was last Wednesday, in Shakopee, on Thursday.  The state highway 169 has been closed for more than a week.  Part was reopened on Thursday, but will probably be closed again by tomorrow.  Both bridges in St. Peter closed, and are probably still closed, and my morning commute has been extended by 20 minutes of going around the long way. 

Early last Sunday morning, 2 brothers on their way home from a party in Shakopee thought they might be able to drive across a closed stretch of Highway 101, through the rising Minnesota River.  How deep could the water across the road be? Surely not more than a couple of inches?  In the dark, they must have lost track, or lost the road, and they were suddenly in deep enough water that their engine stalled.  The inevitable sobering effect of this was perhaps not sobering enough: they got out to push the car back out of the water, and all three, two brothers and car, were swept away by the river.  One brother was rescued from the line of trees along the river bank at 6 am.  By eight o’clock  the rescue team deemed it too dangerous to continue searching for the other brother or the vehicle. 

Other than that, in daylight and sober, Minnesota River towns have been mostly okay, not because the flood isn’t extreme, but because after the big floods of ’93 and ’97, most of the towns raised and strengthened their levees and dikes.

But a flood on the Minnesota River doesn’t end on the Minnesota River.  It goes on to become first, a flood in St. Paul (the St. Paul airfield, down on the floodplain, was closed last week) then in Hastings and Red Wing and Wabasha, and on down the Mississippi.  Today the flood wave was due to hit Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, some 100 river miles below St. Paul.  Tonight’s rains have been extensive, a large thunderstorm system dumping more rain everywhere in the Upper Mississippi drainage, a huge triangle of weather – both rain and snow storms- wheeling across the plains toward the Great Lakes and beyond

This is not good.  This is not just the drainages of the Minnesota, the St. Croix, the Upper Mississippi –all now within a few cubic feet per second of bankfull or already long overbank  - this storm system will boost the headwaters of the Missouri, the headwaters of the Ohio.  I’m no flood hydrologist, but it doesn’t take much to know that this is not a great way to start up the spring flood season.

Right now, at ten pm, the flash flood watch for a region that stretches across Morton, Redwood Falls, New Ulm along the Minnesota River, across Itasca and the upper Mississippi, across the border and the St. Croix drainage to Wisconsin.  And west of here, the Red River Basin is expected to get 3-5” of wet snow.  It’s April 22, Earth Day, more than a month after the first day of spring.  In Fargo, flood season is just beginning.

First Wednesday of the Month

Tornado Season

Here is a thing Midwesterners know.   Sometime in the middle of the day, often the middle of a sunny day, maybe right after lunch, the sirens will sound.  Tornado sirens.  It’s right after lunch, the sun is shining – it can’t be anything to worry about, on thinks.  Then, remembers.  Oh of course, it’s one o’clock, it’s Wednesday, it’s the first Wednesday of the month. 

On a college campus, where students may be arriving in the fall from all sides of the country, or of the world, there might be a small panic.  Until a Midwesterner explains to these new foreigners that the sirens are always tested, in every small town in the Midwest, on the first Wednesday of the month at one o’clock.   Then they know, too, and forever after, once a month, will feel that same startle, then will check the sunny sky, check their watch, and relax, maybe smiling at themselves and at their new knowledge.  Simple.  One o’clock first Wednesday of the month.

Visuals

There are days and weeks and months when I am not exactly too busy to write, but too busy to stop and think about what I've been doing and seeing, long enough to have anything to say about it.
But I have been taking photos. Of students and rocks and --of course-- birds.

On Monday I went paddling along the lakeshore with a friend - me in my spinning-in-the-wind river canoe, and she in a wooden sea kayak she built nearly 20 years ago (check out www.pygmyboats.com, my latest object of boat-lust). Suffice to say that I worked a whole lot harder than she did Monday AM.

Along the way, she pointed out an eagle's nest along the south shore, within the boyscout camp.  Even without binoculars, we could see 2 eagles, apparently juveniles, perched on the edge of the nest.
Tonight, Sue and I took friends out on the pontoon to look for the nest again.  Which we found, with no eagles.  Folks in another pontoon pointed them out in a tree along the shore -- two adults.  Later, we did see one of the "babies" on a branch near the nest.
So I took photos.  And then, we went up to the head of the lake to spy on the pelicans.  Still there.  More photos.

Ω

So for my first blog in ten weeks, here are photos of them, and also of a trip I took last month to Bear Lake, on the Utah/Idaho border, during some spring migration.  The osprey, red-throated loon, and hay field shots are from there.

Also in this set, my NEMESIS, the red squirrel that lives in the big ash in the back yard.  Last week, this squirrel pulled down the suet feeder and dragged it up to the front yard.  I don't have it back up yet -- of course I haven't seen the downies since.

This flock has been hanging out at the mouth of the Cannon River, on the west end of Lake Byllesby, since the big flocks passed through in March.  There are about 20 in this group.  I don't know if some are nesting in the area, but it seems likely. Check out the kingfisher on the tall snag.

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The rest of these are from Bear Lake, on 5/20/11

I think this must be a red-throated loon, given the loon shape and lack of a neck ring. They winter in Cabo, and breed in the Canadian arctic.  Just passing through.

Hope

"Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up." -David Orr

I admit I have been near-speechlessly gloomy and disheartened by, but not quite resigned to, the Fukushima disaster.  This reminder, from one of the most articulate environmental thinkers of our time (and one whom I have had the pleasure of knowing personally) has helped.

Trombone Swans

The only thing clear from these photos of trumpeter swans at the mouth of Prairie Creek is that I need a better lens.  I shot these through my binoculars.

Yes, I'm pretty sure they are trumpeter swans, rather than tundra swans, for two reasons:I didn't see any yellow on their beaks (my binoculars are much better than my lens-plus-binoculars), and the ruckus they were raising was a few octaves lower than any of the recordings of tundra swans I'm finding online today (maybe they should be called trombone swans).

There were sixteen of them in this flock, six bright white adults and ten gray and white juveniles.  The juveniles spent most of the time I was watching popping their heads up and down and calling - trying to get some action out of the adults, who were trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon nap.