LNG TERMINALS UPDATE
(Updated April 2008)
Click On The Chart For A Larger Version
LNG Chart Worth Ten Thousand Words
Nahant is the little white pile of rocks at left center in this chart. One of the new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals is east and slightly south of Nahant; the other is east and slightly north. Both LNG terminals are in a small triangle of ocean surrounded by Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (NMS), two state ocean sanctuaries, the Boston Harbor shipping lanes and the precautionary area. An extraordinary 79 out of the 350 endangered North Atlantic right whales still left alive -- that's 22% of the entire species -- were
detected in April, 2008 in Cape Cod Bay and the area covered by this map. This
map is a part of the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for the Neptune LNG terminal. It may be accessed at: http://www.epa.gov/region1/npdes/permits/draft/2008/draftma0040258fs.pdf.
The map is figure 1, towards the end.
SWIM Hearing Testimony
Safer Waters in Massachusetts (SWIM) testified at the March 27 public hearing in Beverly on the NPDES monitoring permit for the second liquefied natural gas terminal, proposed by Neptune LNG. The testimony included the following
statement:
"Although SWIM has focused here on monitoring and the effect on the whales, other major concerns include the presence of toxic, chemical, hazardous, and radioactive wastes in close proximity to the new LNG terminals; the effect on the fisheries; the proximity of three ocean protected areas, including Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary; safety in case of an LNG spill/explosion or a terrorist attack; the lack of a regional energy plan that would accentuate renewable and alternative energy sources as well as conservation, and the danger of a disabled tanker drifting to shore in a major storm.
"The North Shore was fortunate that no blizzard with high winds occurred when the liquefied LNG tanker Catalunya Spirit lost propulsion recently off Cape Cod and was towed to the site of the new Northeast Gateway LNG terminal. A Nor’easter at that time could have wrecked the Catalunya Spirit on our shore, and once ignited it could have...obliterated Nahant."
What an LNG Disaster Would Do to Boston
An additional note on LNG: There is a very informative article at the Boston Firefighters website, www.bostonfirelocal718.org about the potential of an LNG tanker to cause destruction. It also has a reference to the Sandia National Laboratory report, which gives more technical detail. www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/oilgas/storage/lng/sandia_lng_1204.pdf
During World War II uranium was purified and processed by Metal Hydrides in Beverly, just north of the Salem-Beverly bridge, for the Manhattan Project to build the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.
Safer Waters in Massachusetts (SWIM) wrote to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on May 7, 2007, asking for information on dumping of radioactive wastes in Massachusetts Bay. The NRC replied on August 14, 2007, saying that "the only Atomic Energy Commission licensees located in the environs of Massachusetts Bay were the General Electric Steam Turbine Generator manufacturing facility in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
(VIEW THE LETTER FROM NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION TO SWIM)
Apparently Metal Hydrides never had a license to dump. Whether this means that they dumped without a license, whether it means they had no wastes (unlikely) is not clear from the NRC information.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. SWIM believes it is important to monitor for radioactivity during construction and operation of the new offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, since it is a documented fact that radioactive wastes were dumped there in the 40s and 50s.
SWIM Letter To Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Download PDF
May 25, 2007
Safer Waters in Massachusetts (Nahant SWIM, Inc.) wrote on May 7 to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) asking that they investigate the potential dangers of radioactive waste from the refining of uranium for the Hiroshima atomic bomb in Beverly in the 1940s by Metal Hydrides Corporation, in light of proposals for two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals adjacent to Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The NRC wrote back on May 14 that they would try to locate information that would be responsive to our questions. Above is a link to this correspondence.
This is even more urgent than our May 7 email to the NRC indicates. Construction of the Northeast Gateway/Algonquin LNG project was scheduled to begin on or around May 24. Northeast Gateway/Algonquin, received its last permit, an Incidental Harassment Authorization from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), on May 14. A copy of this permit, which rejects SWIM's request for a public hearing, may be found at:
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20071800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2007/pdf/E7-9216.pdf
After writing to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SWIM learned something new to us: one of our members was in contact with a friend of hers, Vilma Hunt, PhD, a scientist who is working on a biography of Peter Alexander, founder of Metal Hydrides, the company that supplied uranium during World War II. The friend sent us two draft chapters of her book, primarily a biography but with eye-opening comments on Metal Hydrides. In the first chapter ("An ANZAC - Almost Forgotten"), I was struck by the statement that "The only available uranium metal in the United States in the 1940's came from their company, and they supplied it for the first nuclear experiments attempted by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia University." And that they worked 24 hours a day to produce uranium metal. In the second chapter ("Peter Alexander and Metal Hydrides - A Small Duchy"), Hunt notes that the uranium "was the real stuff, uranium metal - not just uranium ore or oxide," and "better than 98% pure."
The location of the Metal Hydrides plant was just north of the Salem-Beverly Bridge. There was a major cleanup there, completed a few years ago, but of the building and land, not of Massachusetts Bay.
Here is why this is important. The offshore dumpsite is located in a triangle of seabed immediately west of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. This is no accident. The Sanctuary boundaries are said to have been set deliberately so as not to include the area of the dumpsite. Apparently the founders wished to have the Sanctuary steer clear of possible liabilities related to any future clean-up obligations as to the dumpsite. As a result, the triangle of seabed containing the dumpsite is the only inshore seabed footprint in Massachusetts Bay and north of the charted shipping lanes not encompassed within a Sanctuary area.
The placement of the proposed LNG sites within this same triangle is also no accident. To have proposed an LNG terminal within a Sanctuary area would have made its permitting considerably more forbidding, if not impossible. This means that locations within the same triangle of seabed were the only feasible ones. In particular, placement within the triangle means that the pipeline needed to deliver highly-pressurized gas ashore from an offshore LNG terminal does not have to pass under charted shipping lanes, where the pipeline would be particularly at risk of rupture in case of an anchor dropped in an emergency or an accident.
Squeezing the terminal sites into this triangle means that highly-disruptive heavy seabed construction must take place in close proximity to the dumpsite. This includes the setting of heavy anchors, and deep trenching to bury the high-pressure gas delivery pipelines. Even after the construction is finished, the heavy anchor chains – strong enough to hold very, very large ships in all conditions of weather, sea, swell, and tide – will be slewed across the bottom as the strains on the various chains increase and decrease and drag some of the chain cables laterally across the seabed. All of these create conditions to disturb the seabed considerably. This not only will stir up long dormant seabed material – far more than any effects of fishing activities – but can also create chafe, abrasion and impacts on objects lying on the bottom.
Stirring up the sediment can be bad enough, because no one knows the history of the drums of toxics dumped long ago. Some of these may well have leaked or been ruptured over the many decades spent on the bottom, due to corrosion, impacts or plenty of other causes – dropped anchors, disruption by fishing gear, and more. Stirring up the sediment could agitate some very nasty substances into the watercolumn, in such a way that it can then be distributed by the tidal currents and become bioaccumulated in marine life, including in commercially harvested species.
But drums that may somehow have remained intact to this day stand at risk of rupture by the new forces – outlined above – that arise solely from the installation of an LNG terminal. Drums scattered on the bottom could contain either radioactive waste or other highly-toxic chemicals or biologicals.
The proposed LNG terminal sites are placed outside of the charted limits of the dumpsite. The same goes for the proposed routes of the high-pressure gas connector pipelines.
But the charted limits of the dumpsite can provide little comfort. No one knows with any reliability just where these drums really are on the seabed – the ones filled with radioactive waste or other toxins. True enough, the material destined for disposal was indeed supposed to be dumped within the charted limits of the dumpsite. But no one can confirm that the crews who did the dumping actually “hit the target,” or even tried very hard to do so. Back in the day – circa the 1950s – there certainly was no GPS. It is also quite likely that the vessels aboard which the “let ‘er go” decision was made were not equipped with even as much as Loran, which was the best commercially-available electronic navigation technology of the day, and the accuracy of Loran did not remotely approach that of GPS.
More than all of this, however, is the fact that there was no oversight of the actual location where dump loads were released by the crews of the vessels involved. There is no record or suggestion of any form of monitoring of the actual release locations – no form of quality control of the actual surface locations where dump loads from the carrying vessels. This casualness would not be tolerated today of course, but the dumping took place long before even the current atmosphere of care as to environmental matters. Indeed, records do reflect that the dumping program was eventually recognized as improper by some of its own insiders, who concluded that the character of the dumping was actually improper. This apparently led to termination of the program.
All of these means that there are very reasonable grounds to believe that a considerable quantum of the dump material could actually have been deposited “wide of the mark.” There is certainly no evidence to show that all of the radioactive drums actually ended up within the charted area of the dumpsite. This means that, for reasons of haste, malfunction of the dump gear, navigational error, or mere laziness (“looks close enough for me – let’s head back to the dock”), over the course of decades, could have caused drums radioactive material to be dropped well outside the charted limits of the dumpsite. This includes areas where pipeline trenching is now charted to take place, or where anchors will be set and dragged in the course of moving the trenching barge or the pipelaying barge, or the barge that backfills over the laid pipe, or where the massive anchors for the mooring buoy chains will be placed, or where the anchor chains will sweep once an LNG terminal is in operation. The aggregate history of environmental remediation in the last generation reveals a pattern of frequent indifference on the part of toxic generators generally toward whatever environmental constraints may have existed in an era such as the 1950s. Bad substances have been found strewn willy-nilly at many sites, and the offshore dumpsite had no owner, and thus no one who could be held accountable for shortcuts in its use. And of course Murphy’s Law was surely no less active in those days than in these.
So, the LNG terminals present a genuine – and apparently irrefutable – risk of rupturing drums of radioactive waste, or other dangerous toxins, and releasing their contents into the watercolumn, and thus into the food chain via the harvest of the Massachusetts seafood industry. This industry has been buffeted badly enough already, and certainly does not need a “California spinach” scare – like the one experienced last year – to add to its problems. This is a very real economic issue.
As serious as this is, the proponents of the projects have not done anything to evaluate, much less to quantify, still less to mitigate or avoid these risks. This is their burden, and nothing in the on-file Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) submissions affords any basis for comfort on this front.
The Metal Hydrides history is a strong basis for the inference that radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project may have been included in the material scattered in and around the charted area of the dumpsite. But even if the Metal Hydrides waste was actually dumped elsewhere, it is clear from the records that some radioactive waste was sent offshore, supposedly to (or toward) the dumpsite. With or without the Metal Hydrides material, there is a serious radioactive waste risk connected with the offshore LNG proposals, and no basis to discount it. For this reason, the FEIS submissions as to these projects are fundamentally inadequate and the LNG projects should be halted.
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The map below shows the location of the proposed LNG terminals, between three ocean sanctuaries. The diagram shows how LNG tankers would be attached to anchors by chains that can scour the bottom, potentially uncovering old radioactive wastes.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
The illustrations are from the Whale Center of New England (www.whalecenter.org/lng.htm)
ILLUSTRATIONS:
View An LNG Area Map (Larger)
View An LNG Facility Diagram
The illustrations are from the Whale Center of New England (www.whalecenter.org/lng.htm)
Buffalo, Whales and Offshore LNG projects
(from October 16, 2007 Lynn Daily Item)
by Polly Bradley
Today is the 100th anniversary of the day the buffalo returned to Oklahoma - October 16, 1907.
Next month is the 100th anniversary of Oklahoma statehood - November 16, 1907.
I grew up in Oklahoma. When my grandparents were children, there were millions of buffalo (bison) on the prairie. But when my father was a little boy in 1907 there were just two small wild herds left in all of North America, numbering only 550 animals. And there were a few in captivity, including some in the Bronx Zoo in New York. There were none left on the southern prairie, none in Oklahoma, where my father grew up. Then 100 years ago, on October 11, 1907, a little herd of 15 buffalo was shipped west by railroad from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma, where they arrived on October 16, 1907. The old Indians met the train in full ceremonial regalia, and it is reported that tears were streaming down their weather-beaten cheeks.
The buffalo were left alone, not shot at, not run into by LNG tankers, and they multiplied.
When I was a little girl, we used to go camping in the Wichita Mountains. We swam in the lakes, hiked in the hills, and watched the buffalo and the prairie dogs. I was camping there with my family when the atomic bombs were dropped and World War II ended. By that time there were hundreds of buffalo in the Wichita Mountains. The Oklahoma range land is beautiful. Imagine if all our blue ocean were waves of green and gold grass. And the Wichita Mountains have never been overgrazed, because when the range was full, the wildlife refuge started giving buffalo away to any rancher who would promise to start a little herd of his own. Today there are over 200,000 buffalo in North America, and they are in no danger of extinction.
Now I live in New England, in the small seaside town of Nahant, Massachusetts. I swim in the ocean, hike on the seashore, go whale watching and think about the buffalo and the whales. Less than 400 North Atlantic Right Whales are alive today, and they are in grave danger, like the buffalo a hundred years ago. We cannot herd the whales into the Bronx Zoo or fence off sixty-two square miles of prairiefor them, so we must save the whales in the ocean, their home.
Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals are being constructed in Massachusetts Bay between Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, the North Shore Ocean Sanctuary, the South Essex Ocean Sanctuary, and the shipping lane into Boston. These sanctuaries were set up specifically to bring back severely depleted cod, haddock and other fish and to protect endangered whales, turtles, and other marine animals.
These LNG terminals will place highly explosive gas right in the middle between three ocean sanctuaries, in a tiny triangle of unprotected ocean. Huge tankers, constantly present, twisting and turning in the wind, will be replaced frequently by new vessels. Whales have not evolved to avoid ships very well, and every year in the North Atlantic a few whales are hit and killed. Whales have evolved to orient themselves by sound, and every year some are beached, apparently having lost their sense of direction from the loud sounds of ships, explosives, and navy tests. The North Atlantic Right Whale is most critically endangered, but five other endangered whale species frequent Massachusetts Bay: the humpback whale, the fin whale, the sperm whale, the sei whale, and the blue whale. In addition, four endangered species of sea turtles are found in the waters adjacent to this proposed LNG terminal: the loggerhead turtle, Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, leatherback sea turtle, and the green sea turtle.
Yes, we need natural gas, but no, we should not be driving the Right Whale to extinction to get it. We can hook up to the nationwide grid of gas pipelines anyplace, but we don’t have prime whale habitat everyplace. And it's time to get serious about alternate and renewable forms of energy.
This is why I've spent much of the past year trying to keep the LNG terminals away from the whales. The money and power are all on the other side, but the success story of saving the buffalo is engraved in my Okie heart, so it was necessary to do what I could to save the whales.
If you ever get to Oklahoma, go see the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. You'll love it, too. While you're there, wish the State of Oklahoma a happy 100th birthday for me.
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