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"Stimulus funds wills ease environmental concerns BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY Congressman Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) met with representatives of the Department Energy Tuesday at Brookhaven National Laboratory to announce that the lab will receive an additional $28 million in Recovery Act funding to complete the dismantling of the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor by this fall. The remaining steps include the removal of a 300-foot stack at the site and a concrete shield that once surrounded the reactor's core, already removed. Also to be dismantled are concrete air ducts, equipment from an associated ventilation building and exhaust filters, and other contaminated pipes and structures."

A judge has given a green light to a class action suit filed by a group of Long Island homeowners worried about toxic leaks seeping into their property from the nearby Brookhaven Laboratory in Upton. Suffolk County homeowners say past leaks of chemicals from the renowned lab have reduced their property values and endangered their health.

A judge has given a green light to a class action suit filed by a group of Long Island homeowners worried about toxic leaks seeping into their property from the nearby Brookhaven Laboratory in Upton. Suffolk County homeowners say past leaks of chemicals from the renowned lab have reduced their property values and endangered their health.

"In two previous posts, I wrote about the path I had gotten on, back in 1995, to shut down a research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The reactor, called a High Flux Beam Reactor, or HFBR, had its operations suspended and was eventually shut down, in 1999, after an investigation established that tritium had leaked from spent fuel pools and had contaminated ground water within and beyond the Brookhaven Lab site. I met many people while working on the BNL issue, as well as other battles involving nuclear power. One of them was Randy Snell, a Long Island resident who raised his family near Brookhaven. Snell's daughter developed a rare form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, which was found in several other children living near BNL. The total number of cases was fifteen times the national average. Snell, and others who were struggling with "rhabdo" (and other soft tissue cancers) near reactors or enrichment facilities, told me that exposure to low-level radiation is a factor in the disease."

President, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Before the Indian Parliament votes on limiting the liability of nuclear operators due to accidents, it should carefully consider the much higher limits that the United States has set for itself about $11 billion per incident industry maximum (under the Price-Anderson Act). The liability of the operator of the plant would be just Rs. 500 crores, about $110 million, which is just one percent of the U.S. limit, and about $450 million per accident. The proposed law allows an adjustment of this upwards or downwards to a possible lower limit of just Rs. 300 crores, or about $65 million. But more than that, Parliament should consider that the actual damages could be far greater than the U.S. liability limit. A 1997 study by the U.S. governments own Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, found that the severe spent fuel pool accidents could result in damages from somewhat under $1 billion of up to $566 billion, depending on a how full and hot the pool is at the time of the accident and the intensity of the postulated fire. The high-end figure would amount to over $700 billion in 2009 dollars. Vast amounts of land --- up to about 7,000 square kilometers in the worst case would have to be condemned. Large numbers of people would have to be evacuated. Further, the maximum estimated monetary damages do not take into account some critical elements. For instance, the Brookhaven amount does not include excess cancer deaths, estimated to range from 1,500 to more than 100,000. Worst case nuclear reactor accident cancers and condemned area were estimated to be generally comparable to the upper end of the spent fuel accident estimates.

Todd Jacobson had an interesting piece in some of the ExchangeMonitor Publications this week, saying DOE's Office of Science apparently is rethinking plans to rebid contracts for managing the national labs. The next lab contracts coming up for competition are Brookhaven, ORNL and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), and Jacobson noted that DOE had delayed release of the Brookhaven RFP. His story noted the lack of competition for lab contracts in recent years and quoted one Capitol Hill staffer as saying, "I don't see any reason to shake things up unless there's a strong push for it, a benefit we'll all get out of it."

SUMMARY: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice as required by 42 CFR 83.12(e) of a decision to evaluate a petition to designate a class of employees at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, to be included in the Special Exposure Cohort under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000.

The just-published Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town is a book about a community, tragedy and governmental malfeasance. Written by Kelly McMasters, who teaches writing at Columbia University and grew up in Shirley, it has broad significance. It's the story of how Walter Shirley, a Brooklynite who trained at the Camp Upton in Suffolk County during World War I later built a community named for him south of the Army camp and how, after World War II, the federal government turned Camp Upton into Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).

"Sitting in Bill Richardson's office while he was Secretary of Energy under President Clinton was an opportunity that my colleagues and I from Standing for Truth About Radiation had worked hard to obtain. We wanted Richardson to not only close the research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, but also to shut down the Millstone plant in Waterford, Connecticut, which we asserted had been killing enormous amounts of fish with its water intake system for cooling. Local groups had been charging Millstone with destroying millions of pounds of local fish and with pumping superheated water back into the Long Island Sound, the temperatures of which had negatively impacted fish and shellfish habitat for decades. Richardson, like any DOE Secretary before or after him, wasn't all that interested in closing Millstone. Everywhere we went, government officials like Richardson invoked the figure "20 percent." Twenty percent of domestic power in the US is derived from nuclear energy. The clean and safe source of power."

"The Energy Department will reduce the size of former nuclear waste sites needing environmental cleanup by 40 percent by the end of 2011, fueled largely by Recovery Act funding, a top official said. The footprint of Cold War-era sites to be cleaned up will be reduced from 900 square miles to 540 square miles during fiscal 2011, said Ines Triay, assistant Energy secretary of environmental management. The department's goal is to clean up 90 percent of contaminated areas by 2015. Energy received $6 billion in Recovery Act funds to accelerate cleanup efforts. To date, $5.6 billion in stimulus funds has been obligated and $1.7 billion has been spent, Triay told the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces at an April 21 hearing. Stimulus funds will be used for many projects: Accelerate by seven years the removal of radioactive waste at 11 sites; remove 2 million tons of waste material from the uranium mill in Moab, Utah; and build the infrastructure required to support high-level waste processing operations. In addition, Recovery Act funds will be used to speed up completion of cleanup activities at three small sites: Brookhaven National Laboratory and Separations Process Research Unit in New York, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California."