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Fouling Our Nest: The Nuclear Threat to Nebraska’s Environment

Paul Olson

We have all seen the horrendous films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the Pacific atolls destroyed by hydrogen bomb tests, of the lands and lakes in Central Russia wasted by the Soviet Union’s tests there. We know what nuclear war can do to the environment. We do not know as well what a nuclearized peace can do. It may present an equally difficult choice to Nebraskans.

Greenpeace and other like organizations have taken up their cudgels against the repetition of the Hiroshimas and Nagasakis. However, the environmental community has not spoken with one voice about the threat of nuclearized peace to America and the world.

We have seen pictures of natural parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests where a nearly pristine ecosystem seems to survive. In Nebraska, consider the Crescent Lake National Wildlife area or the Nine Mile Prairie or a hundred other ‘perfect’ places. But are such places all that we seek as environmentalists? The great poet and farmer Wendell Berry has long criticized the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations for trying to make perfect places for ‘the wild’ without working equally hard to make the so-called domesticated landscape work with the wild. We are stewards of the domesticated, and what we do with it both affects us and the wild:

I decided not long ago that I would not endorse any more wilderness-preservation projects that do not seek also to improve the health of the surrounding economic landscapes and human communities. Whatever its difficulties, my decision to cooperate no longer in the separation of the wild and the domestic has helped me see more clearly the compatibility and even the coherence of my two allegiances. The dualism of domestic and wild is, after all, misleading. It has obscured for us the domesticity of the wild creatures. More important, it has obscured the absolute dependence of human domesticity upon the wildness that supports it and in fact permeates it… [T]hough the wild sheep and the farmbred sheep are in some ways unlike in their domesticities, we forget too easily that if the ‘domestic’ sheep becomes too unwild, as some occasionally do, they become uneconomic and useless: They have reproductive problems, conformation problems, and so on. Domesticity and wildness are in fact intimately connected. What is utterly alien to both is corporate industrialism — a dislocated economic life that is without affection for the places where it is lived and without respect for the materials it uses (italics mine, Sierra Magazine, November/ December 2006).

Berry is right. We have to look to how we foul our own nests and not just to how the fowl in our neighborhoods can have unencumbered nests.

When Berry writes that what is utterly alien to wildness and domesticity is a corporate industrialism that is without affection for the places in which it lives and without respect for the materials it uses, he does not mention the hub of corporate industrialism — the Military-Industrial Complex. There are no groups that have less affection for the places where they ‘live’ and less respect for the materials they use than the American military.

I wish to examine this issue of military fouling in Nebraska in detail, first looking at nuclear war-related sites in this issue and then at conventional ordnance related ones in the next issue of the Nebraska Report.

Terror & Nuclear Threats

The first places to look for possible environmental damage from our war machine are our nuclear plants, these run by the Energy Department, which also makes our nuclear weapons — and not by the Department of Defense. Nuclear energy plants were brought into being by President Eisenhower to be the first line in our production of nuclear fuels for nuclear weapons. Nebraska has three of these nuclear plants, all in the metropolitan areas of Eastern Nebraska.

Over two years ago, Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Waste Specialist for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C. noted in the Nebraska Report that the 1984 book, Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy, called for “alternative reactor siting — underground and/or in very remote locations [as well as] improvements in containment effectiveness... [as well as] an end to centralized energy facilities in general and nuclear power plants in particular... In the long run, this may be the only way to provide security, because the mere existence of nuclear power plants makes us all potential nuclear hostages.’”

Kamps continues, “Nebraska’s reactors are neither buried nor remote. The Ft. Calhoun plant is a mere17-mile drive from Omaha, and 36-mile drive from Bellevue, home of Offutt Air Force Base and StratCom (Strategic Command). Cooper Station in Brownville, just east of the town of Auburn, is a 75-mile drive from Omaha, and only 66 miles from StratCom. Of course, as the crow flies (or wind blows), the distances are even shorter. StratCom, being the nerve center of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other far-flung military activities (U.S. Space Command, nuclear weapons arsenal control center, etc.), is in and of itself a potential target for terrorist attack. StratCom’s proximity to these commercial nuclear reactors, though, makes for a particularly dangerous combination.”

The Threat of a Nuclearized Peace

The reactors and missiles as tools in a war may be no more dangerous than they are in a time of nuclear peace. Their disrespect for “the places where our life is lived and their lack of respect for the materials our life uses” is dangerous to human health now.

First, there is the Hallam plant built in 1962 near Olive Creek Lake and entombed in 1964. It is difficult to know how safe the entombment process will be over the long haul, but Hallam appears not to be a problem now.

Second, the other two Nebraska nuclear plants, the 1973 Cooper Nuclear Plant located at Brownville — perhaps the oldest, most historic place in ‘European’-based Nebraska — and the 1974 Fort Calhoun plant near populous Omaha (also a center of affection for many of us) have not been exempt from accidents. On May 31, 1992, an engineering accident occurred at Fort Calhoun. Two accidents have occurred at Cooper: on Aug. 8, 1990, a steam valve failed and on June, 2001 an electrical fire burned for more than a quarter of an hour, making the plant go on ‘alert.’ A reactor recirculation pump having a potential to affect safety equipment shut down, and backup power to the plant’s emergency response center did not fully kick in. The plant also failed to meet its deadlines to notify local authorities of the problem (Omaha World-Herald, Dec. 19, 2001). The possibility of a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl-like episode exists at either the very antiquated Cooper or Fort Calhoun plants.

The long-term environmental effects of our failure to plan for high-level nuclear waste are devastating. The two working nuclear plants here give Nebraska about 30 percent of its electricity. Yet, we have no idea where we will store their spent fuel. Since 1983, we in Nebraska have committed $276.1 million to the federal Nuclear Waste Fund to finance nuclear waste management. We do not know that the Yucca Flats Nevada site to which we have contributed will ever be used and, for the time being, the approximately 400 tons of used fuel at our reactors temporarily sits in water-filled vaults that could themselves be subject to explosions, spills or other accidents.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Public Power District plans to spend $45 million more and the Omaha Public Power District $23 million more to expand the storage systems of each for high-level radioactive waste. So we will by the near future have spent at least $330 million on nuclear waste storage without having a clue as to what we will do with it ultimately, or what the environmental effects of our or others actions on that waste might be. These costs are particularly disturbing in view of our failure to invest significant money in wind turbines, which now can generate electricity for the same cost as conventional sources, and in view of the fact that domestic-sized turbines only cost between $3000 and $40,000 and large 4-million-Kwh turbines, that compete with all other forms of energy production, about $2 million. We could have 115 of those for what we have already paid for temporary high-level storage.

If the making of the high-level radioactive material carries the risk of pollution, so also do the weapons themselves. The Atlas F missile, an early nuclear ICBM missile, was located around Lincoln in a variety of communities in the 1950s and ’60s on the grounds that we needed a nuclear capacity to fight off the Soviet superiority in tanks and infantry. The Fs were often placed in hardened silos and used liquid fuels, all to enhance our capacity to resist Soviet attack. Now the Fs are striking back at us. The Atlas F site, five miles west of York, which closed in 1964, four years after its construction, has left behind its own form of contamination. The U.S. Corp of Engineers found in 2006 that TCE (Trichloroethylene), a solvent once used to clean out fuel lines at the missile site, has been released into the groundwater and exists in concentrations that exceed the regulatory standards for drinking water.

The plume of chlorine has reached to within a little over four miles of York (some accounts say within the city limits). TCE in improper doses causes numbness and facial pain, reduced eyesight, unconsciousness, irregular heartbeat, nausea, liver and kidney damage, impaired immune system function, cancer and a host of other medical problems. TCE dissolves into the groundwater and remains there, evaporating from water brought to the surface. It is dangerous to drink, swim in, shower in or bring in touch with the skin in any form. Cleanup by Kemron Environmental Services goes ahead at York, at what cost to taxpayers is uncertain.

In addition 11 more abandoned Atlas sites exist in Eastern Nebraska, at Elmwood, Eagle, Avoca, Nebraska City, Tecumseh, Cortland, Beatrice, Wilber, York, Seward, and David City. So far as I can discover, TCE was used at all of the sites. Hence, the potential for contamination at one or more of these sites is great. This potential’s risk is heightened by the Defense Department’s refusal to listen to the Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the risk of chemicals that have leeched, or have been deposited, into the soil and water at military sites. The Defense Department claims, contrary to virtually all other groups, including groups of scientists, that TCE in small quantities is not particularly dangerous to health. Not only atomic missile sites were afflicted with TCE contamination; the Nike sites at the Warren Air Force Base near Kimball are also seriously contaminated. In addition, by 2002, “the EPA ha[d] identified 75 perchlorate releases in 22 states, including Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, New York, Maryland and Massachusetts, as well as California… Defense-industry dumping is suspected in nearly all these cases, though perchlorate has also been linked to fireworks and other explosives, automobile airbags and Chilean fertilizers… The EPA says it will take hundreds of years and cost several billion dollars to clean up the known plumes.”

Some Recommendations

For the time being, these recommendations seem to me to be in order for NFP and our environmental organizations to support:

• That Nebraska and Nebraska Public Power Districts refuse all new nuclear plants so long as we have no secure highlevel permanent waste storage for the byproducts of the electrical generation process.

• That all present waste in Nebraska be removed to temporary water-filled storage vats away from metropolitan areas and away from StratCom into secure desert areas in the West. The Nebraska Legislature should petition the federal government in regard to this problem.

• That Nebraska immediately invest as much in wind power as it has cost to find temporary storage for spent nuclear fuels — that is, about $330 million.

• That sufficient state lottery funds concerned with environmental quality be used to develop an independent assessment by environmental scientists of the presence of TCEs, perchlorates and radioactive or other dangerous materials in the soils and water proximate to Nebraska’s nuclear power and nuclear weapons sites.

Nebraska sits on the largest underground aquifer in the world and it has some of the best soil in the world. Folly has told us to foul each of these to ‘defend’ ourselves on the grounds that we are far away from the coasts and our military sites will be safe. Hardly anything could be less safe. We have already lost much of our life in trying to protect it militarily.