A group called Concerned Citizens of Honolulu has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a hearing on a nuclear irradiation facility that is proposed to be built on the South Ramp of the Honolulu International Airport. Earthjustice is repre senting the group in proceedings before the NRC.
The petition, filed October 3, asks for a hearing to address safety and related concerns regarding Pa‘ina Hawai‘i’s application for an NRC license and the NRC’s decision not to require preparation of an environmental im pact statement or environmental assessment for the project.
The NRC has said that the project falls under a “categorical exclusion” for irradiators – a finding that generally exempts them from the need to prepare an environmental assess ment or more detailed environmental impact statement. But the petition argues that “while [the National Environmental PolicyAct] does allow agencies to identify ‘typical classes of action … which normally do not require either an environmental impact statement or environmental assessment …’ it also man dates that agencies ‘provide for extraordinary circumstances in which a normally excluded action may have a significant environmental effect.’ Here the NRC unlawfully failed to consider whether any extraordinary circum stances precluded application of the categori cal exclusion to Pa`ina Hawai`i’s license ap plication.”
Much of the license application has been withheld from public review, so few people outside the NRC know the measures that Pa‘ina Hawai‘i plans to take to secure the 1 million curies of cobalt-60 that will lie at the heart of the planned facility. Proponents of the irradiator have claimed that the operation is safe and involves little chance of a release of radioactivity to the environment. The peti tion sets forth a litany of plausible, if unlikely, scenarios undercutting that view.
Disasters
The proposed site is just a few feet away from the ocean and is no more than seven feet above mean sea level. It is in a tsunami evacuation zone and, according to the peti tion, “would also be vulnerable to wave run-up and high winds associated with a major tropical storm or hurricane, as illustrated by the catastrophic losses along the Gulf Coast in September 2005 from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Pa‘ina Hawai‘i’s application has no discussion of the potential for such emergency events and the procedures that would be implemented should they occur, in violation of” NRC regulations.
There is also the possibility, the petition states, of aviation accidents that could directly or indirectly affect the irradiator’s operations. The proposed site is just off active runways. According to records of the Federal Aviation Administration, the Honolulu International Airport has experienced an average of 2.17 accidents a year from 1982 through 2004. “This is an extremely high accident rate for a nuclear facility located in such close proximity to a runway,” the petition states. “Pa‘ina Hawai‘i must analyze the likelihood and con sequences of an air crash, and discuss whether the location is appropriate for such a facility, including whether the facility can be hard ened to mitigate the consequences of an acci dent.”
The petition describes risks associated with transporting casks of cobalt-60 “pencils” to Hawai‘i. “Unlike irradiators located in the continental United States, whose source ma terial can be supplied by rail or truck, this facility would require Co-60 to arrive by plane or boat, presenting unique risks. In particular, if the shipping cask is to be transported by plane, the impact of an air crash must be assessed… If the cask is to be transported by ship, a discussion of the modal transfers and the likely exposure to workers, inspectors, and the public must be provided. The application must also address the threats to the communi ties through which sources arriving by ship at Honolulu Harbor must transit to reach the proposed irradiator site.”
Cobalt-60 has been described by the gov ernment as a possible tool in the hands of terrorists wanting to wreak havoc through a so-called “dirty” bomb. When the University of Hawai‘i irradiator was decommissioned earlier this year and some 1,000 curies of cobalt-60 was hauled off for disposal, a news release from the agency in charge, the Na tional Nuclear Security Administration, stated, “removal of these radiological sources has greatly reduced the chance that radiologi cal materials could get in the wrong hands… The University of Hawai‘i, its surrounding neighbors, and the international community are safer today as a result of this effort.”
Concerned Citizens’ petition says that the Pa‘ina Hawai‘i irradiator would have the op posite effect, “creating new threats of cata strophic harm to the people of Honolulu by placing in the middle of the airport a source of Co-60 one thousand times greater than the one the NNSA confiscated.”
A Health Risk
The petition proposes that a complete evalu ation of the irradiator would have to consider the healthfulness of the end product – irradi ated produce. “That Pa‘ina Hawai‘i intends to use the irradiator primarily to treat food for human consumption establishes additional special circumstances requiring preparation of an EAor EIS,” it states. At the time irradia tors were granted a categorical exclusion by the NRC in the 1980s, irradiation was used primarily to sterilize medical and pharmaceu tical equipment, and to produce sterile insects for eradication programs. Given that the Honolulu irradiator would not be built but for the contemplated sale of irradiated food products, the petition argues, “the irradiator and the contemplated sale of irradiated food are ‘inextricably intertwined,’ and thus ‘are connected actions’ within the meaning of the [federal] regulations.” A full assessment of the environmental and health consequences of the irradiator, then, should include an analy sis of the nutritional quality of irradiated produce, the petition states.
And such an analysis would not be pretty, the petition suggests. It cites the work of William Au, a professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston. In a declaration accompanying the petition, Au states that one of the radiolytic products found in irradiated mangoes and papayas – 2-ACB–has been shown to be “genotoxic and mutagenic” in in-vitro tests and warrants further inquiry. Another study of a different radiolytic product raises “a high level of concern,” Au states in his declaration. That study demonstrates, Au says, “that com pounds found exclusively in irradiated dietary fats may promote colon carcinogenesis in animals treated with a known carcinogen and identifies a new area of toxicity that neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration nor the World Health Organization has yet exam ined.”
Concerned Citizens attorney David Henkin says that the process of determining whether a hearing will be granted could take a couple of months or more. Should the NRC deny the petition, that finding could be ap pealed directly to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, he said. The hopes of Michael Kohn, owner of Pa‘ina Hawai‘i, to be up and running by next February might be a little optimistic. On the other hand, when citizens of Milford Township, Pennsylvania, were granted an NRC hearing on an application for a nearly identical irradiator, the petitioners’ request for a stay stopping operation of the facility was denied and cobalt-60 sources were loaded into the irradiator before the hearing had even begun.
Yet the Milford Park irradiator, operated by CFC Logistics, Inc., is hardly what Kohn and other irradiation proponents might hold up as an example they would want to emulate. After little more than a year of operation, it shut down. Only last month, the NRC, satis fied that the facility had been properly decom missioned, withdrew its license.
Homeland Insecurity
On the UH Campus
One of the people testifying at the NRC’s public meeting about the Pa‘ina Hawai‘i proposal on August 31 was James H. Moy, emeritus professor atthe University of Hawai‘i. “I can present myself as a researcher in tropical fruit irradiation who quite likely holds the world record of having eaten the most irradi ated papaya. I started eating irradiated fruits in 1965… Today I find myself very healthy.”
Moy’s health may be sound, but his judg ment?
In September, Environment Hawai‘i dis closed that Moy and the University of Hawai‘i were issued notices of violation by the NRC following an incident in which the creaky irradiator in the university’s food technology building had been left unattended, unlocked, and its security alarm disabled. Last month, the murky water surrounding the NRC deter mination became a little clearer. That’s when the agency, following disclosure of the viola tion in Environment Hawai‘i, declassified many of the documents relating to its investi gation of the incident.
What follows is a more complete account:
An Accidental Discovery
As reported, James Moy, the university pro fessor in charge of the irradiator for more than three decades, left the door to the facility unlocked on March 17, 2003. By his own account, he went to the gymnasium for a workout during his lunch break. With a maintenance engineer scheduled to come by to replace burned-out fluorescent light bulbs, Moy didn’t want to hang around to let the maintenance worker in, so – as he acknowl edges having done many times before – he left the irradiator unlocked and unattended and disabled the alarm system.
According to the NRC investigation re port, while Moy was away from his post, “officers from the Honolulu Police Depart ment were on campus conducting unescorted security inspections for the Department of Homeland Security.” While inspecting an other building on campus, they found an unlocked door that should have been locked, so the “police notified the university presi dent of their findings.”
As a result of an apparent “miscommuni cation,” the NRC investigators determined, the “chief of staff” whom the president dis patched to investigate the Police Department findings went to the irradiator building in stead. There, he found the outside entrance to the building unlocked.
The following day, Moy was summoned to the administration building and ques tioned about the event. Moy “admitted to disabling the lock on the door and disengag ing the security alarm so the maintenance worker could replace the bulbs,” the NRC Office of Investigations determined.
After the university discovered the un locked door, it ordered a24-hour guard posted at the facility until the alarm system could be rewired into the fire-alarm system. (Until that time, if security were breached, an alarm would sound in the irradiator office – the same office Moy had left unstaffed.) Moy was ordered to explain his actions and write up an account of the event. He was “verbally repri manded by the university,” the NRC re ported, and on January 7, 2004, the univer sity asked the NRC to remove Moy from his position as radiation safety officer. Moy was officially removed by the NRC from that position on March 18, 2004.
Three days before Moy’s removal, an NRC inspector was conducting “a routine inspec tion of the [university’s] broad scope license,” the investigation report states. Moy told the inspector that the university had recently indicated it wanted to place the irradiator into “storage only” status and was working with the U.S. Department of Energy to plan the decommissioning of the facility, which still contained 1,100 curies of cobalt-60.
“During a walk-through of the irradiator facility, [Moy] … told the inspector that he was opposed to the shut down of the irradia tor facility, and felt that its closure was to punish him for an incident that had hap pened approximately 1 year earlier. The in spector asked [Moy] to describe the inci dent.”
The NRC then began its own investigation into the university’s compliance with terms of its license for the irradiator. It found that after Moy was called on to explain his action and “counseled” by the university, “no further specific actions were taken against the irradia tor facility PI [principal investigator] at that time, nor was the issue discussed at any radiation safety committee meeting. Some time later, a decision was ultimately made to decommission the irradiator.”
On January 25, 2005, the NRC informed the university of its findings: “Based on the results of this inspection, one apparent viola tion was identified and is being considered for escalated enforcement action… The appar ent violation involves the failure to secure from unauthorized access licensed material that was stored in controlled areas. The ap parent violation is of particular concern be cause it may have involved wilful action on the part of licensee personnel. [The Office of Inspection report] concluded that a member of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa staff wilfully failed to secure from unauthorized access, licensed material that was stored in controlled areas.”
Campus Inspections?
As mentioned above, the NRC investigation report took note of campus inspections made by unescorted officers of the Honolulu Police Department on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security. Mary Tiles, a philoso phy professor who is president of the faculty union, said she had no knowledge of such inspections being made.
Jim Manke, director of communications for the Manoa chancellor, said, “If it hap pened, I guess someone must have known about it.” He could not say if Honolulu police continued to visit campus on behalf of DHS.
Calls to the university’s campus security office were not returned. However, a media liaison officer with HPD told Environment Hawai‘i that in 2003, “UH had problems with some type of material deemed to be hazardous. It needed to be disposed of.” He said that the police department helped as sess the type of chemicals involved, “not on behalf of homeland security.”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 16, Number 5 November 2005
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