Proposal to ship nuclear waste through Charleston questioned

By Dan McCue , Staff Writer

A proposal to ship as much as 20,000 tons of nuclear waste from Italy through the Port of Charleston and Port of New Orleans for eventual disposal in Utah is raising questions among members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee.

According to a September application filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions wants to transport the hazardous cargo through Charleston and New Orleans, then take it by barge, truck or rail to a processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The company also has offices and several facilities in Aiken, Barnwell, Columbia and Greenville, although none of these locations was mentioned as being involved in the effort detailed in the company’s application.

Starting next summer, the Barnwell LLRW Disposal facility—one of three in the nation that accepts low-level radioactive waste—will accept material from three states: South Carolina, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Under the plan outlined in EnergySolutions’s application, material processed in Tennessee would be sent on to a disposal facility in Clive, Utah. However, material deemed too dangerous to be accepted at the waste facility would be sent back to Italy the same way it came into the country— through Charleston and New Orleans.

EnergySolutions said if its application is approved, it expects the imported waste to begin arriving in spring 2008. Shipments of the material would continue for about five years.

S.C. State Ports Authority spokesman Byron Miller said the authority does not handle radioactive materials at any of its public terminals. That suggests, he said, that if the application were approved, the material would either have to be transported through federal facilities, like the Naval Weapons Station in North Charleston, or through private terminals.

In their letter to the NRC, Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the top Republican on the House energy committee, and Kentucky Rep. Ed Whitfield, the leading Republican on the panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, said they found it troubling that EnergySolutions can’t determine whether any of the waste material is too dangerous for a low-level waste facility until processing takes place in Tennessee.

They said this could mean that the “radioactive composition of some of the waste arriving” through the ports will exceed the commission’s limits for low-waste disposal.

The legislators also questioned whether the commission has ever allowed the importation of radioactive wastes “without a clear understanding of its exact type and composition” and whether a license has ever been granted for such activity with the understanding that “some of the wastes will be so dangerous they must be exported back to the country of origin.”

In a statement, EnergySolutions said many companies import waste through U.S. ports and that it’s a world leader in the safe handling and disposal of radioactive materials.

Conservation group sues to stop terminal

By Dan McCue , Staff Writer

The S.C. Coastal Conservation League is ratcheting up its battle against the proposed construction of a new cargo container terminal at the former Charleston Naval Base, suing the Charleston District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in federal court.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston on Nov. 20, alleges that federal permits issued for both the terminal and a road connecting the terminal to Interstate 26 were based on studies that understated the true environmental and traffic-related impacts of the $600 million project and obscured options available for reducing harm to residents.

The Corps issued a permit to the S.C. State Ports Authority for the terminal in April at the same time that it issued a permit to the S.C. Department of Transportation for a port access road that is intended to keep truck traffic generated by the terminal off local roadways.

Preliminary work on the new three-berth terminal began in May, and the first phase of operations at the new facility are expected to begin in 2012.

The 30-page lawsuit alleges that the Corps violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to “analyze the project as a whole, as the law requires … (and instead) piecemealed it into smaller segments.” As a result, the league contends, the Corps didn’t examine potential alternatives to the project, ensured the project’s cumulative environmental impacts were undisclosed and ultimately allowed the selection of a predetermined outcome.

As a result of these actions, the league charges, the Corps “obscured the fact that pollution from the terminal and connecting road will cause the Charleston region to exceed national maximum air standards for soot and will depress oxygen levels in the Cooper River to below state minima—violations that negatively impact public health and the environment and promise severe hardships for economic development in the Charleston metropolitan area.”

The league’s lawsuit asks the court to set aside the permits and to issue an order halting all terminal development activity on the site until a “new, complete analysis that looks in earnest at the costs and benefits of—and best alternatives for—meeting the region’s container shipping needs in a way that protects human health and the region’s natural resources.”

In a written statement, Chief Public Affairs Officer Connie Gillette said the Corps stood by its decision and the process that led up to the issuance of the permits. A total of nine state and federal agencies gave the permits their blessing, including the Federal Highway Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries service, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, and the S.C. State Historic Preservation Service.

“Throughout this process, we dedicated a tremendous amount of resources to ensure all interested parties, especially the public, were actively engaged in the National Environmental Policy Act process,” Gillette said in the statement.

The SPA also issued a statement in support of the plan, saying that after four years and $5 million in studies, “it’s clear that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the cooperating agencies took a hard look at this project.”

“The final Environmental Impact Statement totaled more than 5,000 pages of technical studies and comments … Port development at the Navy Base is good for the economy, the community and the environment,” the authority said in its statement. “This project not only meets the standards, it exceeds them.”

Dana Beach, the league’s executive director, said there are flaws in the studies that endorsed port expansion at the former Navy base, and moreover, they don’t take into account the plan by the states of South Carolina and Georgia to jointly build a container terminal on the Savannah River in Jasper County.

Beach holds that the Jasper County site has almost none of the infrastructure constraints that Charleston has, and that the improvements deemed necessary at the Savannah River site would cost a fraction of the Charleston improvements’ pricetag.

North Charleston considers $60M Noisette deal

By Molly Parker , Staff Writer

Following a three-month delay, North Charleston will consider a deal Tuesday to reimburse the Noisette Co. for up to $60 million in infrastructure improvements to the historic Charleston Naval Base.

A special finance committee meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall. A meeting with a similar agenda was called for Sept. 18 but was abruptly canceled after some council members expressed concern about approving the bond plan outlined in the previously created tax-increment financing district covering the historic Navy Yard.

The finance committee will consider a deal to reimburse Noisette for the infrastructure improvements in phases, said Councilman Kurt Taylor, the committee chairman.

Under the plan, Noisette also would agree to tax itself through creation of a municipal improvement district. The tax revenue would be used to pay down the bond the city would float once the project is complete. 

The Navy Yard is included in a tax-increment financing district per state statute, a development tool the Legislature applied to all shuttered bases, past and future. The city, however, still is charged with its traditional role of outlining how the funds should be repaid and on what schedule. A preliminary repayment plan was approved by the city in 2004.

“It’s what we agreed to do in the right framework,” Taylor said. “We said we’d use public financing techniques. There shouldn’t be a decision yes or no, or anyone saying I haven’t heard of this before.”

If approved, the plan will go before the full council during Thursday’s regularly scheduled meeting.

Noisette spokesman Keith West declined to discuss the upcoming meeting. 

The infrastructure improvements would pave the way for development of roughly 120 acres of the 300 acres the Noisette Co. refers to as The Navy Yard at Noisette, enough land to support about 2,100 residential units and 2 million square feet of commercial space, company CEO John Knott has said.

Nuclear lobbyist, former EPA head, advocates for nuclear energy

By Molly Parker , Staff Writer

A former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief has a message for South Carolina: Embrace nuclear energy plants in the future and push the presidential candidates to do the same.

“South Carolina is going to be an important state in the upcoming presidential election,” said Christine Whitman, who served as a member of President Bush’s cabinet as the agency administrator from 2001 to 2003. She was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.

“People should be asking (candidates), ‘What is your vision; how are you going to meet the 40 percent projected increase in the nation’s power demand, and where do you see something like nuclear?’ ” Whitman said.

Whitman, now a co-chair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, a lobbying group that supports nuclear energy, last week addressed students and professors at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and dined with business leaders. She also spoke at Clemson University.

Nuclear already accounts for over half of South Carolina’s energy portfolio, and the state is poised to play a significant role in the next wave of nuclear construction. It’s been nearly 30 years since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a new permit application, though a slew of utilities, including three that operate in South Carolina, plan to file applications by early next year.

South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper are filing a joint permit to build at least one more unit, and possibly two, at the existing V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Jenkinsville. Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp. is planning to apply for the same permit to build anew in Cherokee County.  

Whitman conceded that some people are still uneasy with nuclear energy, remembering headlines long etched in their minds about the 1979 meltdown accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania that was not catastrophic but that led to tightened federal regulations, and the April 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl in which massive amounts of radioactive material spewed into the environment.

Yet before either of those events, President Jimmy Carter had turned the nation away from nuclear energy with concerns terrorists could attack nuclear power plants and use the technology to create nuclear bombs, Whitman said. But she said that anti-terrorist security has been tightened so much that the decades-old threat should no longer worry the nation.

“The kind of security and regulatory provisions we have make it impossible to think of a scenario today where terrorists could really use it against us (on our own soil),” she said, noting that the global debate about other countries’ rights—especially Iran’s—to use nuclear technology is another issue entirely. 

Whitman said most of the people she meets are open to the idea of giving nuclear energy a second chance in the United States. But she said some existing misconceptions about it unnecessarily cause fear.

“If they learn about nuclear energy from Homer Simpson, they might not get the most current facts,” she said of the popular cartoon character whose day job is working in a nuclear power plant in a fictional town. The bumbling character often causes near-catastrophic meltdowns at the plant by accidentally pushing the wrong buttons.

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