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Pirner Retiring from DENR; Get Set for Noem to Engage in Corporate Capture!

After 44 years of public service, Department of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Steve Pirner is retiring:

Earlier Friday, Pirner submitted his resignation letter to Gov. Kristi Noem, according to his email to staff.

The email began: “As you all know, DENR has been in a rebuilding mode for more than a year now. For example, we have many new employees, we have invested in new technology, and we have invested in new computers and Windows 10 as we speak. It is time for that rebuilding to extend to the Secretary as well.”

His note continued, “I have decided that 44 years of public service is probably enough. Some would say more than enough. It is time for new ideas to lead the next generation of DENR employees. This morning I submitted the attached letter across the street.

“It is each and every one of you who have made DENR the best department in state government, so THANK YOU for all you do. My parting words of advice are to keep getting the job done, keep on providing the best customer service you possibly can, and keep ‘Having Fun!‘”

He concluded: “Thank you all again.”

A 2004 profile said Pirner, who grew up in Rapid City, received bachelor and master degrees from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology [Bob Mercer, “Pirner Is Stepping Down as South Dakota’s DENR Head,” KELO-TV, 2019.07.21].

Pirner steps out August 2, so Governor Kristi Noem has two scant weeks to name a replacement. Starting placing your bets on which corporate lackey Noem will appoint to South Dakotans’ last defense against environmental predations. Will it be CAFO profiteer G. Mark Mickelson? Someone from South Dakota’s cheese-industrial complex? Or maybe TransCanada’s Sara Rabern?

34 Comments

  1. Kal Lis 2019-07-22 08:20

    What are the odds that she will leave it unfilled or have someone serve in an “acting” head capacity? It’s a tactic that her mentor in DC uses.

    Also, tangentially related, that mentor and his administration seem intent on gutting FERC.

  2. Loren 2019-07-22 08:45

    So, Cory, are you saying you think Kristi will step outside the family for this appointment? ;-)

  3. mike from iowa 2019-07-22 09:18

    Will it be …. why not all three and they can divide the water usage and pollution between the three main abusers. Wingnut mantra “Costs More, Does Less.”

  4. Donald Pay 2019-07-22 09:19

    I have mixed feelings. I’m not sure how much of the disasters at DENR have been his fault, since he was at a lower level for much of his time at DENR. Most of my problems with DENR came from the political side, not the scientists. The low points of Pirner’s time, of course, were many, but particularly the Gilt Edge debacle. He and Tolefsrud tried to convince the feds not to enforce strict water discharge regulations against heap leach mines. Then there was the recent Gilt Edge Superfund Site corruption, which he went along with.

    Still, he was a professional scientist, and that counts for something. I know how that department works, and there is a constant struggle between the scientists and the political folks. If there was too much political pressure, he could pull out the science credential. I hope whoever gets the DENR nod has a science/technical background. I’m not interested, by the way.

  5. Debbo 2019-07-22 15:14

    Kal, I just read that and was going to link. Here’s the thing, a Democratic commissioner is resigning under pressure next month. That will leave 1 Democrat and 2 GOP on the commission. It’s gonna get worse.

    FMI, follow Kal’s link.

  6. grudznick 2019-07-22 16:40

    Darn nabbatit, Mr. Pay! I was going to suggest you’d be the perfect choice, get you back into South Dakota so your bloggings about sewage ash and The Borehole would be from a real South Dakotan! I guess that leaves them having to bring this Mr. Tolefsrude fellow back out of retirement to keep the canoe from swinging too much in the wind.

  7. grudznick 2019-07-22 17:05

    grudznick heard that Mr. Pirner was really not a fan of The Borehole, so maybe now that he’s out of the way the D.E.N.R. can get that dug, #4Science, of course.

  8. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-22 18:53

    If you will recall, there was no radioactive waste associated with the proposed drilling. Many opponents believed a positive test drilling would lead to selecting the test site as a permanent storage location. Others wanted no progress at all on solving our national nuclear waste impasse, because then we may produce more nuclear energy.

    So the only thing that we really learned is that if you don’t want to know any answers, don’t allow investigations to proceed. #4StoppingScience.

    Because the defense wastes in question held little to no value, simple isolation would have been fine. But being able to retrieve it and move it elsewhere if circumstances changed, particularly with regard to a community’s consent, would still be helpful in any storage plan.

  9. Donald Pay 2019-07-22 21:30

    grudz, DENR people don’t hold positions such as “I’m really not a fan of The Borehole,” so I don’t know where you heard that. Any time something like The Borehole comes up, DENR staff have to figure out where it fits in their regulatory system, and I’m sure they were sort of like me thinking “we don’t really know what the hell we’re going to do with this.” Being a little careful about something that is unprecedented seems a reasonable position, particularly since DOE did such a piss poor job of explaining the project. I mean they never submitted any project plans or details for DENR to look over and approve or disapprove, so how could they have any position.

    When Dr. McT says there would be no radioactive waste associated with The Borehole, he’s assuming the DOE is honest or that it never makes mistakes. Ask Nevada about the radioactive waste that DOE “mislabeled” and sent to Nevada “by mistake” in annual shipments since 2013. DOE doesn’t have the greatest reputation for honesty, integrity, or safety.

    At any rate, Trump killed off the Obama Borehole project. At least Trump did one thing right.

  10. Debbo 2019-07-22 22:11

    Don said, “grudz, DENR people don’t hold positions such as “I’m really not a fan of The Borehole,” so I don’t know where you heard that.”

    Remember, he’s by far the biggest liar on DFP so he’s probably lying about that too. He lies about seeing other DFPers, groups he belongs to that don’t exist, friendships that aren’t real, his identity. Biggest liar on DFP, rivaling the Liar-in-Chief. Never believe a word either of them says. They just make stuff up because they think it’s fun to malign and hurt people.

  11. grudznick 2019-07-22 22:43

    Perhaps they could bring up some pretty young woman. A CPA. And a Nurse. Yes, that would work. And if she was a stunt pilot that would really shake up the environmentalists.

  12. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-22 22:50

    Sorry Mr. Pay, but the testing that was under debate wouldn’t have used any radioactive waste at all. It was just a drill (pardon the pun).

    The Congressional delegation from Nevada agrees that the situation with regard to the nation’s nuclear waste storage is a problem. I don’t have a problem with Nevada wanting the same ability to provide consent as anyone else, and I don’t have a problem with having more than one national permanent waste site.

    I do have an issue if a process is proven to be safe, and nobody can get to providing consent. Consent is very important, but apparently not for those communities that are de facto storage facilities after their nuclear plant shut down.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/politics/doe-radioactive-waste-nevada/index.html

    The CNN article notes that the mixing of hazardous waste (chemical) and low level radioactive waste needs to go through another step so that one removes the potential for things that can react with water or air and generate heat or flame. Low level radioactive waste contains things like mops and rags and clothing that can get contaminated.

    “Lovato said the Energy Department has indicated they are not as concerned as they initially were about reactive waste at the site, but they have yet to send records and test results that show it isn’t an issue, so until they do Nevada officials are waiting.”

    So I’m sure that Nevada will get the information they want…either from DOE or at the waste site located in Nevada.

  13. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-22 23:08

    So yup, DOE made a mistake. And it has been on-going apparently for at least 5 years without anything happening.

    Is it a mistake to go whole hog on renewables without having a recycling infrastructure or a waste management plan paid for ahead of time? Yes, it is a mistake. That mistake is partly DOE’s as well I am afraid.

    That isn’t a call not to do renewables, that is a call for getting the proverbial act together with regard to life cycle issues.

    Ironically for opponents of nuclear, solving the nuclear waste issue will facilitate more backup energy for renewables that does not emit carbon. And without nuclear, heat waves lead to even more fossil fuel consumption to satisfy the demands for cooling.

    So do you want to reduce carbon or not?

  14. Porter Lansing 2019-07-23 07:53

    Follow the money and it ain’t pretty. The best place for those piles on nuclear waste is right where they’re at. Why? Because once they’re moved Doper Don Trump’s Republican greed merchants will deregulate and label the former nuke sites as safe and open for development. Wanna live in a cancer zone? What if the new rules say you don’t have to be notified, tested, or compensated when your kids get leukemia?
    Make America Cancerous Again!

  15. Donald Pay 2019-07-23 11:01

    Dr. McT, Yup, DOE made a mistake—a half decade or more mistake, all of it against the law. They didn’t, of course, tell Nevada what they were doing, let alone even attempt to gain consent. This is why you don’t want to deal with DOE and especially the nuclear offices at DOE. This is why the Blue Ribbon Commission wanted a separate agency created to deal with radioactive waste matters and consent. Trump, of course, has done away with consent.

  16. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-23 11:10

    As you know, I am in favor of reducing the waste as much as possible and extracting value before any permanent disposal takes place, and that is as true for nuclear as it is for renewables.

    In the case for nuclear, the final waste product that has no further benefit could be encased in a glass to fully immobilize the radioactive by-products. Plus, if they really did max out the reprocessing, the time that it takes for that final by-product to get below natural background levels of radiation is on the order of a couple hundred years, not a couple hundred thousand years.

    With regard to sites that are cleaned up, there are these things called radiation detectors that work pretty well (#4Science). So if they truly clean up the site you can walk through with a detector and measure whether the radioactivity is below background. Surprise…nature is naturally radioactive and we cannot get that to zero.

    Meanwhile, heavy metals from renewables have an infinite lifetime, and there is no plan to isolate them or process them. Shouldn’t we eliminate pathways for cancer from renewable manufacturing and waste management (or have a plan for recycling and waste management that differs from sending everything to the dump)? But you do not want to treat nuclear and renewables in the same way.

    We could use nuclear energy to bust those heavy metals up into smaller, less toxic components, but that would mean nuclear would be beneficial. Donald, Jerry, Debbo, and Leslie may have to take away your far left decoder ring for that one (…what do you mean “Drink your Ovaltine”?).

    The alternative path for renewables is to learn some lessons about waste management from nuclear, to use the abundant process heat from new nuclear to help recycle renewable wastes, and then isolate any toxic by-products far from the water table, if not destroy them. I don’t believe there is much choice between continuing what we are doing now with renewables, and moving toward a more sustainable and safe path for renewable waste products.

    And yes, you may still have to isolate something from the biosphere. Renewables will eventually have to face that particular Waterloo, which could mean (dare I say it) consideration of deep boreholes.

  17. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-23 11:25

    There is more interest now in doing something consent-based in Congress. But as with many Obama-era initiatives, the Trump Administration probably views in via a different lens.

    DOE has not been removing wastes from nuclear power plant sites as they promised. But we the people have not allowed them to do so. There are many locations and many rock materials that are suitable, and we could also take measures to reduce the radioactivity and the volume as well. But we would have to pay for that to occur, and learn something about nuclear science too. DOE is the fall guy on this one, because we don’t want to lay any blame on ourselves.

    Consent is important. It is important for Nevada, and it is important for those communities who are now living next to a de facto nuclear waste storage facility. And it is important for the community that enjoys the benefits of hosting such a facility.

    Having more than one permanent location and more than one temporary location for storage will avoid people feeling like they are being picked on, and retrievability of said wastes will provide additional flexibility.

    If you are a champion of consent-based processes, you should be working hard to show that a consent-based process can work. The alternative is a non-consent based process. That will be important both for nuclear wastes and renewable wastes.

  18. Dave 2019-07-23 12:03

    Kind of sudden don’t you think? I wonder if it has anything to do with the Agropur permit?

  19. Debbo 2019-07-23 13:27

    Robert said, “Donald, Jerry, Debbo, and Leslie may have to take away your far left decoder ring for that one.”

    I believe you are implying I am anti-nuclear. That is incorrect, but nuclear waste and other issues do concern me.

  20. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-23 14:47

    My apologies…what is the biggest issue that you have with nuclear waste today or nuclear in general today? I can’t change minds, but I can try to get into why things are the way they are.

    I think we all agree on the need to reduce carbon and the need to incorporate consent in the process, but we disagree on what it will take to get there.

  21. Donald Pay 2019-07-23 17:26

    Dr. McT said: “DOE has not been removing wastes from nuclear power plant sites as they promised. But we the people have not allowed them to do so. There are many locations and many rock materials that are suitable, and we could also take measures to reduce the radioactivity and the volume as well. But we would have to pay for that to occur, and learn something about nuclear science too. DOE is the fall guy on this one, because we don’t want to lay any blame on ourselves.”

    The “people,” and certainly anti-nuclear activists, are not to blame for the federal government’s failure in this regard. Nuclear industry lobbyists, Congress and the Reagan Administration ended all consideration of all those potential host materials, opted to ignore science and used a political solution (screw Nevada bill) to focus on Yucca Mountain exclusively. This bill was opposed by anti-nuclear and environmental activists, who sought to expand the studies being done on all potential host rocks, or at least the ones that had seemed to be hold the most promise based on a decade of previous study. All the politics lined up against further study, because the nuclear industry want a quick and dirty “solution” so they could say they had solved their biggest problem, nuclear waste.

    So, no, “we” are not to blame. I’d put a lot of blame on the nuclear industry and their lackeys in the political system.

  22. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-23 18:13

    I agree that there is a lot of sentiment by industry to push through with Yucca Mountain, and a lot of opposition to it by anti-nuclear activists.

    Not solving the nuclear waste impasse means that nuclear power cannot grow as fast as we need to fight climate change. In addition, we are spending money on the status quo for storage that could be better spent on other things (which impacts anti-nuclear activists).

    However, to say the nuclear industry wants a quick solution after 50 years in a holding pattern makes little sense.

    I am not tied to Yucca, because there are many sites that would work. But Yucca will work too. Republicans in Congress seem to want Yucca as at least one of the potential sites, and the law would need to be changed to consider other sites.

    If we do not follow through with reprocessing, or consuming the waste in an advanced reactor, then we will need another Yucca Mountain at some point in the future any way. Having another site or two may help move things along with the efforts for consent.

  23. Debbo 2019-07-23 20:22

    They’re using tree planting drones in Myanmar with great success.
    http://bit.ly/2OdBtK9

  24. Donald Pay 2019-07-23 21:39

    Dr. McT, the nuclear industry thought it was getting a quick solution with Yucca Mountain, but their political strategy ended up selecting a bad site.

    Dry cask storage on-site for the next 50 to 100 years is probably the most realistic solution in the light of the 35 years we’ve wasted pursuing Yucca Mountain. The first task has to be setting up and funding an agency separate from the Department of Energy to take on these waste issues, as envisioned in the Blue Ribbon Commission. It has to be protected from political meddling, which is what drove us to take a dead end drive to Yucca Mountain. It has to have a dedicated source of funding that can’t be meddling with.

    This agency will have to restart the research on several host mediums that Congress cut off in 1987. The agency will need to build three repositories simultaneously, because it will take that many to actually house the waste, and one may simply not pan out.

    The production of these wastes must come to an end. That means shutting down nuclear power. As long as there is a nuclear power industry buying Congress to short circuit science and safety, no one will trust the effort. There is too much of a revolving door between the nuclear industry and the regulatory agencies. That has to end, and the only way to end it is to end nuclear power, and the vast nuclear industrial complex. The sole effort of nuclear scientists has to be turned to the safe isolation of these wastes, not to their production.

    Of course, consent has to be a part of the way this gets done. Consent will be easier once nuclear power is banned and we are dealing with known volumes, nce the DOE and the nuclear industrial complex has been taken out of the equation, and replaced by a competent agency that is dedicated to science, not the special interests .

  25. Porter Lansing 2019-07-23 22:30

    Wow! Stick a nickel in McT and he’ll drive the blog post rankings up, all day. lol
    As leslie says, “You are spinning the English language I learned in the 60s, to maliciously disparage your liberal neighbors who tell the truth and are invested in the truth.” i.e. We’re not “anti-nuclear activists”. We’re “pro-Earth activists.” cha-ching That ought to keep the wheels turning another 24 hours, huh?

  26. leslie 2019-07-23 22:54

    Funny doc. A trump “lens”is a little gratuitous for that mob of treasonous criminals. GOP/Canadian Lens: melt 52,000 sq miles permafrost for Putin’s arctic mineral access.

    Some “lens”.

  27. leslie 2019-07-27 19:17

    Hey Doc. Ditto as Debbo. I’ve the nuke sailor brother who retired running plants across the country including one almost “Fukashima-ed” on the main stem river system when our dear lord, untouchable insurance broker/gov rounds built his trophy home on the river and then blamed USACOE for his flooded home.

    To use the trump strategy and call liberals hard left in SD as if some kind of identity politics/enemy, is just sour grapes when project objectors use science and beat down the privatized nuke industry, so they call consent something they think will side-step the adversarial permitting process. Either use crony process, big money lawyers, deny science or hardball politics to get the industry money jackpot despite the welfare, will or “consent” of the people.

    The farther away from Mitch Mcconnell “politics” of treason we stay the better. Keep doing Republican politics and the more such borehole projects will be exposed for what they are. “Down and dirty” as Don says, is right.

  28. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-27 19:55

    Wasn’t the borehole favored by Monitz in the Obama administration? And wasn’t consent one of the things that came out of the Blue Ribbon Commission regarding nuclear waste during the Obama administration?

    The problem is that opponents do not want to agree with any science showing said repositories could work. So I am all for science, and sometimes science gives you answers that you do not want to hear.

    Let science evaluate how well these alternative approaches for nuclear waste isolation work…that includes other methods of dealing with the end of the life cycle than Yucca, and other locations. Then you can have a political discussion with access to facts.

    In theory the hard left (maybe they are the ones on the left that like hard lemonade?) want a solution to nuclear waste management, but they have found it difficult to say yes.

    But at the end of the day, the effort and the arguments we have for waste isolation are misplaced. We should be working on reducing the amount of waste to be disposed of first, so we can reduce the mining we need to do and the waste we need to store.

  29. Donald Pay 2019-07-27 22:01

    Secretary of Energy Monez was the only member of the Blue Ribbon Commission who pushed the borehole, and he waited until the very last meetings to push it. It was a last minute addition to the BRC report, and one that didn’t get much discussion. No one else wanted it, but they gave it to Monez as a sop. The concept had gained favor among some DOE scientists and engineers, but others were deeply opposed. The concept depended on Obama reversing the concept of a combined civilian/defense repository, which had been . The borehole was thought only useful for certain defense wastes, not for any civilian wastes, eg., reactor waste. And it was pushed because Monez thought it was a quick way to smooth over bad feelings about DOE in the states of Washington, Idaho and South Carolina, where defense wastes are stored. Trump, I believe, has reversed the Obama finding, so the borehole is dead.

    There is a lot of DOE material on the conceptualization of the borehole dating from as far back as 2010, but Sweden has been doing work on deep boreholes since Dr. Gnirk at SDSM&T worked on deep boreholes in Sweden in the 1970s. The early DOE reports actually singled a certain area in eastern South Dakota as the best place in the nation to site a borehole depository.

    Boreholes for disposal are not a new concept, Russia has done some work on this. There is already a lot of data available regarding deep boreholes. The only reason DOE wanted to drill deep boreholes in South Dakota is to prospect for a nuclear waste disposal site.

  30. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-28 12:36

    Thus borehole testing has never been solely a Republican concept. The Obama Administration could have left it out entirely. They chose not to! Given the politics in Nevada, alternative methods of isolating defense wastes were of interest to both parties.

    And if the Trump Administration opposes boreholes, have you ever considered that it may be doing so simply because the Obama Administration was in support of them? But to be fair, the Trump Administration is much more in favor of Yucca Mountain, as the nuclear industry generally is. Regardless of what you think about it, there is more data and analysis for Yucca Mountain than any other potential storage location. But politically I think there will need to be several, not just one.

    The testing of the borehole drilling procedure did not imply that the testing site(s) or somewhere nearby would be dedicated to the storage of nuclear waste. There was simply the suspicion by opponents based upon a mistrust of DOE that this would occur.

    Isn’t it true that a consent-based process that gets approved may lead to placing more of the emphasis on state regulators and an independent entity not named DOE to get the job done?

    Not doing the testing (not the storing…just the testing!) was a lost opportunity to determine whether waste canisters could have been retrieved after being placed (which had a lot to do with whether the borehole was straight enough). The ability to change your mind is a factor in granting consent in the first place, and this is generally opposed because it would facilitate a consent-based process. And if you don’t wanna know, you don’t wanna ask.

    The drilling of deep boreholes was primarily about the consideration of this method for the storage of defense wastes, but that was NOT the only reason. DOE also has an interest in deep geothermal energy, which means geothermal production of electricity. In terms of boreholes, hot spots under South Dakota mean it may be much better suited for geothermal energy than for deep borehole disposal for nuclear wastes.

    At some point renewable proponents will have to address the isolation of toxic heavy elements and other chemicals for waste management. Ironically, boreholes would be one of the approaches they could consider to protect the biosphere instead of sending those things to the dump. If they could work with nuclear, then we could bust up the toxic elements into smaller remnants. That product would be radioactive, but not for long.

  31. Robert McTaggart 2019-07-28 13:52

    According to an article in the journal Energies entitled “Status of Deep Borehole Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste in Germany”, Germany is looking to phase out nuclear energy in 2022, but no final site for disposal has been selected.

    The main problem for the deep borehole method is that although it could be cheaper than other methods, there is no momentum in Germany for the requisite research and development for optimizing canisters; addressing safety before, during , and after disposal; or the consideration of recovery (i.e. retrievability) for up to 500 years after the disposal.

    It looks like Germany is leaning towards a mined repository that places the waste containers closer to the surface. Recovery and recycling could occur later if technologies improve to their liking.

  32. Clyde 2019-08-03 07:23

    Don’t bury it so that the people can put it out of mind.

    Put the waste in giant sarcophagus’s on stilts and site them in the major urban areas so that folks can be reminded daily of the deadly poison they are creating. I believe the French have done something like that.

  33. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-03 11:39

    So you are in favor of placing toxic chemicals and elements from photovoltaic production or rare earth mining front and center as well?

    ….I didn’t think so.

  34. Robert McTaggart 2019-08-03 12:15

    Which sounds better?

    1. Less clean energy per unit of land used, less timely energy, more waste.

    2. More clean energy per unit of land used, more reliable energy, less waste.

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