Nuclear Waste on Lake Wylie
Duke Power has formed a for-profit company with a French company called COGEMA and a US company called Stone & Webster. This set-up protects each of the parent companies from having to pay the full costs of their plan to use nuclear waste from old bombs in the Catawba reactors on Lake Wylie. Each of these companies has faced either recent bankrupcy, actions by regulators, or ethical questions . Today, as you read this, Duke runs these reactors on a blend of uranium and plutonium from cold-war era bombs. This has never been done anywhere on the planet.
Despite having been warned about difficulties with the evacuation plans for the Lake Wylie area, the NRC has allowed these companies to begin using this Frankenstein Fuel. Waste from this experiment will be stored on-site at the reactor for who knows how long, every day serving as a terrible target for those who want to kill in a spectacular way. Not only risks from terrorist attack, but from any unplanned release of significant amounts of radiation from the reactors, would show the hallow nature of our evacuation plans, just as Rita and Katrina have shown the emptiness of their evacuation plans.
This essay is the first of what we hope will be many pieces on the use of refuse plutonium on Lake Wylie. We believe that all nuclear power plants should be shut down as quickly as possible, and that every power plant be rendered useless for future power production. We believe there is an inherint link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and that nuclear anything begins with risking the lives of workers mining and milling nuclear materials, and ends with risking all our lives with never-ending nuclear waste radiation to contend with. And of course, every step between carries it’s own deadly risks.
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