5. Nuclear power
The Indian Point plant lies along the shore of the Hudson River estuary, famous since European settlement (and probably before written history among American Indians of eastern North America) for its scenery. The power plant’s license is up for renewal, raising the question of whether nuclear reactors of this size should be so near major cities.
Key facts
• About 161 million Americans—more than half the population—live within 75 miles of one of the 104 nuclear power plants in the United States.
• The United States would need 1,000 new nuclear power plants of the same design and efficiency as existing nuclear plants to completely replace fossil fuels.
• Conventional nuclear power plants are not a short-term solution to the energy problem—they are complex and time-consuming to build and are controversial, hence even the siting of a plant takes time. From planning to going online would take a decade or more.
• More important, they’re not a long-term solution either. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes nuclear energy, says there are a total of just 4.7 million tons of “identified” conventional uranium stock that can be mined economically. If we switched from fossil fuels to nuclear today, that uranium would run out in four years. Even the most optimistic estimate of the quantity of uranium ore would last only 29 years.
• The life of a nuclear plant is just 30–40 years, and it costs more to dismantle it than to build it. Estimates for decommissioning and dismantling a large nuclear power plant run from $200 million to $500 million.
• Available federally sanctioned radioactive-waste disposal sites were said to be filled in 2008.
• According to U.S. government estimates, some 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste are stored in temporary facilities. To move these across the country, such as to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, by truck and train would require one to six trainloads or truck convoys every day for 24 years. Now that this site has been rejected by the current administration, there is no planned permanent disposal site.
• The government believes the wastes will remain so toxic for 10,000 years that some kind of warning sign will be needed for that long.
Indian Point: the nuclear power plant in New York City’s backyard
In 1974, over the vehement objections of Westchester County neighbors, the first of three nuclear reactors was built at Indian Point Power Plant in Buchanan, New York, 24 miles north of New York City (Figure 5.1). The power plant is 7.15 miles by road from the house I grew up in, and only a few miles away as the helicopter flies. Indian Point’s second reactor was built two years later, and a third still later. The power plant—minus Unit 1, which was decommissioned in 1974—has been in operation since then, with a capacity of 2,000 megawatts. But Unit 2’s license runs out in 2013, Unit 3’s in 2015, and under U.S. law nuclear power plants must be relicensed. At the time of this writing, the controversy over the plant’s relicensing continues, and whether to approve it has not been decided.
Figure 5.1 Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant stands 24 miles north of New York City’s 8 million people. (Photograph by Daniel B. Botkin)
The National Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced the beginning of the process of relicensing the Indian Point Power Plant on May 2, 2007. By 2008, the relicensing of the plant had become a regional controversy, opposed by the New York State government, Westchester County, and a number of nongovernmental environmental organizations. The plant has operated for 22 years, so what’s the problem?
Originally operated by Consolidated Edison and the New York Power Authority, over the years Indian Point had some difficulties. In 1980, Unit 2’s building filled with water (an operator’s mistake). In 1982, that unit’s steam generator piping began to leak and radioactive water was released. In 1999, the unit shut down unexpectedly, but operators didn’t realize it until the next day, when the batteries that automatically took over ran down.
Today, Entergy operates Indian Point. Under its management, a transformer burned in Unit 3 in April 2007; radioactive water leaked into groundwater, and the source of the leak was difficult to find. These are definite problems, but so far no catastrophic failure has occurred. Which is fortunate, since 20 million people live within 50 miles of this power plant. According to the New York Times, Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said: “Whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”1
In addition to its scenic fame (Figure 5.2), the Hudson was made even more famous when folksinger Pete Seeger helped lead a cleanup of the river, one of the first major river restorations of modern environmentalism in the late 20th century. Before that, in spite of its well-known beauty, the Hudson, like all rivers, had been viewed since European settlement mainly as a means of transportation and a place to dump wastes. General Electric Corporation (GE) polluted the river with vast quantities of PCBs used in the manufacture of electrical equipment. Major lawsuits resulted, and ultimately a court ruled that the chemical was impossible to clean up directly and that GE should fund an organization that would help restore the river. This created the Hudson River Foundation and made one of America’s most beautiful rivers the focus of intense restoration.
Figure 5.2 The Hudson River at Croton Point. Just a short way downriver from Indian Point, Croton Point has some of the Hudson’s most beautiful scenery. (Photograph by Daniel B. Botkin)
Clearly, operating a nuclear power plant at this location not only presents a threat of disaster to 20 million people but is also inconsistent with the goal of preserving America’s scenic beauty.
Nuclear power: no longer new, but suddenly popular
Not long ago, we would have put nuclear power in Section II of this book as a new alternative source of energy. Now we have to list it with our conventional energy sources because it became so important during the second half of the 20th century and is so widely used today. In fact, many people argue that nuclear power is a reasonable replacement for fossil fuels, a suggestion that has grown louder and more insistent with the growing concern about global warming. In 2006 a New York Times editorial endorsed nuclear power. The same year, the famous British environmentalist James Lovelock, whose Gaia hypothesis links all life to the global environment, also said we should turn to nuclear power. Stewart Brand, the originator and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue and whom the New York Times calls one of the originators of environmentalism, was quoted in that paper on February 27, 2007, as saying that he is for nuclear power and feels “guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power.” Even Patrick Moore, who claims to be one of the founders of Greenpeace, has become a spokesman for the nuclear power industry, according to the Times.2
Why are these well-known environmentalists in favor of nuclear power? Patrick Moore put the environmentalist argument succinctly. He wrote: “Wind and solar power have their place, but since they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can’t replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It’s that simple.”3
Stewart Brand put it similarly. While acknowledging that nuclear power has its dangers and drawbacks, he has said that “it also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever-improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a ‘hydrogen economy,’ combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.”
Hugh Montefiore, former Anglican bishop of Birmingham, England, and for 20 years a Friends of the Earth trustee (who resigned over this issue), said that he is pronuclear because “the dangers of global warming are greater than any other facing the planet,” and that “as a theologian, I believe that we have a duty to play our full part in safeguarding the future of our planet.” He sees global warming as the holocaust, and therefore believes that “it is crucial if the world is to be saved from catastrophe that non-global-warming sources of energy should be increasingly available after 2010.” He concludes: “I can see no practical way of meeting the world’s needs without nuclear energy.”4
In short, these three believe that global warming is by far the greatest threat to the planet, that no other form of energy is available in sufficient supply to replace fossil fuels, and that therefore, despite its dangers, it is necessary (Moore), and besides that, it isn’t so dangerous anymore (Brand).
If leading environmentalists are for it, and the big power industry is for it—usually two opposing sides in the environmental debate—then this must be the way to go, right? Maybe not. But statements like these by Brand, Moore, and Montefiore, as well as the endorsement of nuclear power by such media institutions as the New York Times, were among the things that motivated me to begin a detailed examination of all energy sources. In particular, I wanted to find out whether, as Stewart Brand believed, nuclear had become safer, whether it could realistically be seen as a large-scale source of energy, and, most important, whether it truly was the only alternative to fossil fuels.
Nuclear energy today and tomorrow?
Today, nuclear power provides one-sixth of the world’s electricity and 4.8% of the total energy. In the United States, 104 nuclear power plants produce about 20% of the country’s electricity and about 8% of the total energy used (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3 United States energy use (percentage by type) (Source: U.S. DOE, EIA)
As for tomorrow, here’s the bottom line: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which advocates and promotes the use of nuclear energy, states that the “total identified amount of conventional uranium stock” that can be mined economically is 4.7 million tons. According to my calculations, this means that if nuclear energy replaced all fossil fuels tomorrow, that quantity of uranium fuel would run out in 4 years. Even using the most optimistic estimate of uranium ore, it would last only 29 years.5
Here’s how I arrived at this conclusion. Today, nuclear energy consumes about 70,000 metric tons of uranium ore each year to provide 4.8% of the world’s total energy use. Fossil fuels provide 87% of the world’s energy. For conventional nuclear power plants to replace all fossil fuels, the energy obtained from those plants would have to increase 17.4 times, which means using 1.2 million tons of uranium ore each year. You just divide 4.7 million by 1.2 million.
The United States Geological Survey gives even more conservative estimates, stating that 3.3 million tons of uranium ore are available worldwide if the ore is priced at $130 per kilogram (the high end of present prices for this ore), and that there is an “inferred” amount—which I believe means the amount assumed but not determined to be out there—of 5.5. million tons. These estimates imply that the amount of fuel available would be used up in less than 3 to 5 years. Thus, if the goal is to counter global warming by replacing all fossil fuels with nuclear power, this goal cannot be met.
If the goal is to replace just petroleum and natural gas, because these are running out faster, then nuclear fuels would have to provide 63% of the world’s energy, an increase of 13 times, which means annual use of 910,000 tons. At that rate of use, the lifetime of nuclear ore and conventional nuclear power plants would be 5–38 years, and uranium ore would run out before either oil or gas.6
Why isn’t this common knowledge? Instead, the IAEA is quite optimistic about nuclear power’s future, stating that “based on the 2004 nuclear electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient for 85 years.” This estimate assumes that 2004’s nuclear energy production will continue into the future, but the IAEA goes on to state immediately that “fast reactor (breeder reactor) technology would lengthen this period to over 2,500 years. However, world uranium resources in total are considered to be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million tonnes is available for exploitation.”
This leaves the impression that all is well for nuclear-reactor fuel. However, “fast reactors” (breeder reactors) are the kind that can be used to make fuel for atomic bombs. A few experimental breeder reactors were built by the U.S. government, but they were shut down or work on them halted in the 1990s. They are the kind of nuclear reactors that everybody fears Iran or North Korea might build and use to make atomic bombs. Other nations have tried building them, and some are considering or developing them, but to my knowledge no breeder reactor is being used to provide electric energy anywhere in the world. There are good reasons for this: The technology is not there yet, and the reactors are dangerous in themselves, even without considering their potential use in making atomic weapons.7,8
Somebody is sure to say, “But we’ve always found more oil, gas, and coal when we needed it. So can’t we just wait for that to happen?” This is the Potato Creek Johnny gold prospector’s approach. “It must be out there somewhere, we’ll just keep moseying along until we stumble on something.” You can take that approach if you want, but you will be ignoring the best-educated prospecting that has been done and is being done. It ignores the estimate by IAEA that allows for as much as seven times as much uranium ore as is economically available to be found out there somewhere. Indeed, some advocates of nuclear power say that we could concentrate dissolved uranium salts from the ocean and use that. Sure, and at what energy efficiency? My point is that if we want to plan the best we can, we cannot take this approach. It is the muddling through that has always gotten civilizations into trouble.
Today, the major nation that generates the greatest percentage of its electricity by nuclear power is France, with 78% (see Table 5.1). Belgium is second, with 60% of its energy from nuclear plants; Sweden is third with 43% from nuclear. Spain gets about one-third of its electrical energy from nuclear, which makes that nation an especially interesting one since, unlike the United States and many other developed nations, Spain does not get most of its energy from fossil fuels.
Table 5.1 Percent of Electricity Generated by Nuclear Power in Various Nations
It is also interesting to note that almost one-third of all nuclear power plants are in North America and another third are in Western Europe (Figure 5.4). In contrast, all of Asia, with most of the human population, has only about one-fifth of the world’s nuclear energy production. Thus, right now nuclear power plants are largely an issue in North America and Western Europe—that is, in the first major nations to become industrialized and that now have among the world’s greatest energy use and highest standards of living.
Figure 5.4 World nuclear generating capacity in 2004, in billions of watts, by geographic region, for the richest countries in the world (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD).9, 10 This shows that for the richest countries in the world, nuclear power plants and their problems are right at home.
Where exactly do you find uranium ore?
If the limited amount of uranium ore in the world is not enough of a problem, consider how these ores are distributed around the world (Table 5.2). Australia has the largest amount, 22.7%; Kazakhstan and Russia are second and third; and except for Canada and the United States itself, the other leading nations are not necessarily good sources for the United States. One can imagine declining supplies of uranium giving rise to the same global conflicts generated by dwindling oil and gas deposits.
Table 5.2 Nations with the Largest Uranium Ore Deposits
Who pays and who benefits?
Nuclear power is expensive. According to the Nuclear Energy Information Service, which calls itself “Illinois’ Nuclear Power Watchdog for 25 Years,” nuclear power has cost $492 billion, “nearly twice the cost of the Viet Nam War and the Apollo Moon Missions combined.”11 The corporations that built nuclear power plants would be operating them at a loss (or trying to shut them down) if they weren’t benefiting from heavy government subsidies, paid for by your tax dollars.
In spite of these limitations and problems, the Obama administration is moving ahead with the federal funding of nuclear power plants. At the time of this writing, the administration had allocated $18.5 billion for new “next generation” nuclear power plants, to be divided among UniStar Nuclear Energy, NRG Energy Inc., Scana Corp, and Southern Co.12
How safe are nuclear power plants?
Advocates of nuclear power argue that it is safer than other sources of energy. They say that the number of additional deaths caused by air pollution from burning fossil fuels is much greater than the number of lives lost through nuclear accidents—for example, the 4,000 deaths that can be directly attributed to the Chernobyl nuclear power accident and the forecast 16,000 to 39,000 deaths that might eventually be attributed to Chernobyl—are fewer than the number of deaths each year caused by burning coal.13 Those arguing against nuclear power say that as long as people build nuclear power plants and manage them, there will be the possibility of accidents. We can build nuclear reactors that are safer, but people will continue to make mistakes, and accidents will continue to happen. And beyond the possibility of accidental disaster is the now all too real possibility of deliberate disaster.
Aren’t nuclear power plants safer today?
Perhaps not. Here are some examples of recent problems with nuclear power plants. According to Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper, videotapes at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania (60 miles south of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River), showed guards sleeping on the job in September 2007. The following year, on April 10, 2008, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it was going to fine Florida Power & Light $130,000 because six security guards at FPL’s Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Homestead, Florida (just 35 miles south of the center of Miami, next to Biscayne National Park and near Florida’s Seaquarium), were repeatedly caught sleeping on the job between 2004 and 2006. It seemed that one of the jokes from “The Simpsons” television program—Homer Simpson falling asleep at his job at a nuclear power plant—was coming true.14 Earlier in 2008, the NRC had fined the utility $208,000 for failing to provide acceptable equipment to security employees.
While this was happening, FPL was proposing to build two new nuclear power plants, at a cost of $12–24 billion, at the same Turkey Point facility.
The problem of security guards sleeping on the job is familiar to anyone with military experience—one of the hardest things to maintain is alertness when nothing happens most of the time, even though there is always a chance of something very bad happening. As nuclear power plants begin to seem more and more ordinary, and as time passes without incident, people charged with monitoring them and protecting us will be lulled into letting down their guard.
Radioactive waste
I became acquainted firsthand with radioactive waste when I was a graduate student. It was the mid-1960s and the use of radioactive chemicals in scientific research was still pretty new. This was especially true in ecology, where radioactive elements were beginning to be used to trace chemicals in the environment; to study nutrition of animals and plants, food pathways and food webs; and to investigate the possible effects of a radiation spill or atomic bomb on natural ecosystems.
I took a course in “radioecology,” which seemed like the latest and most high-tech thing imaginable in a field whose previous high-tech devices included a map and compass. We used small amounts of radioactive chemicals and did simple experiments. We handled these materials literally at arm’s length, wearing lead-lined aprons and standing on the far side of blocks of lead as we poured radioactive water from one container to another. It was still early in the development of computers and digital displays, and I was very impressed by a line of vacuum tubes, each with a number from 1 to 9 inside, that could be lit by an electric current, and sets of these, attached to a Geiger counter, that would count the number of radioactive decays. It seemed the latest in modern displays, but it actually was so simple that today’s user of a Blackberry or iPhone would laugh at it.
When we were done with an afternoon’s laboratory experiment, the question was what to do with the radioactive waste. It turned out the answer was simple: Following federal regulations, we simply had to wash the stuff down the sink with lots of running water. The concern was with the concentration of radiation in water, not the total amount. Thus, we could dump as much radioactive material as we wanted as long as we diluted it enough. It was a specific and legal example of the familiar cliché “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” and I was quite taken aback by it. It was one small step in creating in me a certain amount of skepticism about how much faith we could have in governments to protect us from toxic substances, especially these radioactive ones.
As I previously noted, dealing with nuclear wastes is a major unsolved problem. Nations and nuclear power corporations would like you to think otherwise, as illustrated by the following quotation from a report by the World Nuclear Association (WNA) that summarizes the situation this way:15
• Nuclear power is the only energy-producing technology which takes full responsibility for all its wastes and fully costs this into the product.
• The amount of radioactive wastes is very small relative to wastes produced by fossil fuel electricity generation.
• Used nuclear fuel may be treated as a resource or simply as a waste. The radioactivity of all nuclear wastes diminishes with time.
• Safe methods for the final disposal of high-level waste are technically proven; the international consensus is that this should be deep geological disposal.
Dismantling nuclear power plants is part of the radioactive-waste problem
The life of a nuclear plant is just 30–40 years, and it costs more to dismantle it than to build it. Estimates for decommissioning and dismantling a large nuclear power plant run from $200 million to $500 million. Unlike power plants fueled by coal, oil, or gas, nuclear power plants have a finite lifetime because the inner workings become so radioactive that it is not possible to go in there and fix or replace things like pumps and valves, and the radiation damages the machinery so that it becomes unrepairable. In theory, a fossil fuel power plant could be run for a very long time by replacing individual mechanical parts and units as they wore out. This kind of plant is something like the ax that the old-time New Hampshire farmer had. His friend said, “Josh, that’s an awfully good ax. Where’d you get it?” And Josh replied, “I’ve had that ax for twenty years, and all it’s needed is two new heads and one new handle.”
You just can’t have a nuclear power plant like Josh’s ax.
Is it true that the problem of nuclear waste has been “technically” solved, so we don’t have to worry about it? Here are some facts. There are 441 nuclear power plant reactors in the world. A recent conference about them held in South Africa reported 220,000 tons of spent fuel—nuclear waste—worldwide since nuclear power production began in the 1950s.16 The International Atomic Energy Agency puts it at about 300,000 tons.17 A 2006 international conference on nuclear waste, held by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Nuclear Energy Agency, put the figure much higher, at more than 2.2 million tons.18 This last number works out to three-quarters of a pound of radioactive waste for every man, woman, and child in the world, whether or not they had access to electricity generated by nuclear power.
That the numbers differ greatly depending on the source should be a serious concern for us citizens. Even after my years of trying, often unsuccessfully, to get good numbers about anything ecological and environmental, I was shocked that international organizations differed so widely from each other in their estimates of the amount of radioactive waste hanging around. If governments and international organizations that deal with nuclear waste don’t know within a factor of 10 how much they’re dealing with, how can we feel confident that they’ll do a decent job of keeping us and the environment safe from it?
If you want to do the numbers on your own, here’s a starting point. According to the World Nuclear Association, a nuclear power plant with 1,000-megawatt capacity generates about 30 tons of the hot stuff as waste each year.19 This means that the Indian Point Power Plant, which has 2,000-megawatt capacity, generates about 60 tons of radioactive waste a year.
The fact is, nobody has yet worked out a good way to deal with radioactive waste.20 According to the summary of the international conference mentioned above, “In all countries, the spent fuel or the high-level waste from reprocessing is currently being stored, usually aboveground, awaiting the development of geological repositories.” In other words, the world’s radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is in temporary holding facilities awaiting agreements about where on (or in) planet Earth these might be safely stored.
How long must radioactive wastes be stored before they are considered safe? A long time—exactly how long depends on which radioactive elements make up most of the wastes, since they differ greatly in the length of time each remains dangerous. But even the World Nuclear Association, which calls itself a “global private-sector organization that seeks to promote the peaceful worldwide use of nuclear power as a sustainable energy resource for the coming centuries,” states that “after being buried for about 1,000 years most of the radioactivity will have decayed.”21 And this is an optimistic scenario.
According to the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, whose stated mission is “to protect the public and future generations from radioactive contamination” and “to provide educational materials on safety and security issues at California’s aging nuclear plants,” radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants remain dangerous for much longer. For example, one component of nuclear power waste is nickel-59. It loses half of its radioactivity in 76,000 years and would be hazardous for 760,000 to more than 1.5 million years, depending on how experts define “hazardous” quantitatively. Another component, iodine-129, loses half of its radioactivity in 16 million years and would be hazardous for 160–320 million years.22 In 2002, EPA was required to create a sign that would warn people about the dangers of radioactivity at the Yucca Mountain nuclear depository for 10,000 years.23 We can take this as the U.S. government’s estimate of how long wastes from nuclear power plants remain dangerous.
What can you do with radioactive waste? Basically, there are three things. First, you can put it in tight containers, store these aboveground, and hope nothing leaks. Second, you can bury them very, very deep in the Earth and hope that the radioactive material doesn’t get into subsurface water and find its way into aquifers that are then tapped by people, or reach natural vegetation, or come to the surface in natural artesian wells, springs, and so forth. Third, you can try to turn the radioactive waste into chemicals and materials so inert that they won’t erode or dissolve before the radioactivity has dissipated.
Yucca Mountain
Some 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste are stored today in a temporary facility and eventually must be moved somewhere to a safer, more permanent facility. For many years, that was going to be the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. The plan was to move all 70,000 tons across the country to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, by truck and train: one to six trainloads or truck convoys every day for 24 years, according to the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO).24 The state of Nevada pointed out that in total there would be 35,000 to 100,000 trains or truck convoys, that these would pass through many of the major metropolitan areas of the nation,25 and at least one-third of the trains and convoys would pass through Chicago. CBS News quoted Senator Harry Reid of Nevada as saying, “Every one of these trucks, every one of these trains, is a target of opportunity for a terrorist to do bad things.... I mean, you talk about a dirty bomb. I mean this is, this is really a filthy bomb.”
There are three primary temporary storage sites, and a total of 39 temporary holding facilities, many on river flood plains. More than half of the people in the United States live within 75 miles of these temporary sites,26 and if Yucca Mountain had been used as the permanent site, at least 85% of these trains with their nuclear wastes would have passed within a half-mile of the Las Vegas strip (Figure 5.5).
Figure 5.5 This map shows that if Yucca Mountain had been used, at least 85% of shipments of radioactive wastes from power plants would have passed within the city of Las Vegas, including near the mayor’s office and within a half-mile of 49,000 hotel rooms along the strip. (Courtesy of Fred C. Dilger PhD)28
In January 2010, President Obama rejected the use of Yucca Mountain as a place to deposit nuclear wastes. At the time of this writing, Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, had established a blue-ribbon panel to consider alternatives to Yucca Mountain, but this panel had yet to meet.27
While opponents of the Yucca Mountain site will be gratified by this decision, the nuclear wastes have already been in temporary (i.e. interim) storage facilities, even though, according to the New York Times, these are forbidden under current law.29 Therefore, as of this writing, there is not even a solution on the table, and the problem remains as it has been for many years. Whatever happens, a place to store nuclear waste safely is necessary for human health and the environment before the U.S. undergoes a major increase in the number of nuclear power plants.
Hasn’t France solved this problem?
When I discuss my qualms about nuclear power, I am sometimes asked: If nuclear power is so bad, how come France gets almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, and there hasn’t been a major nuclear power plant disaster there, and the French people don’t raise complaints about it?
I answer this with another question: What is France doing with its radioactive waste?
France has 58 nuclear reactors. Some of the radioactive waste from these is shipped to Russia, which stores it, for a price, and is also said to process it to recover whatever usable radioactive fuel may be left in it. According to Greenpeace, France sends thousands of tons of nuclear waste to Russia, where it is processed and then stored, again according to Greenpeace, “at extremely contaminated sites in Siberia.” We note that the processing, too, results in a large amount of radioactive water and materials that also then have to be dealt with.
The World Information Service on Energy (WISE) states that the French nuclear station Eurodif in southern France produces 15,000 tons of radioactive waste a year and stores 220,000 tons of waste from French nuclear facilities.30 Notice that this figure is equal to the amount that one of the sources I found said was the world’s total amount of radioactive waste.
France also treats some of its radioactive waste chemically, largely by using it as salts and other metal compounds in ceramics or glass, known in the trade as “vitrified waste.” People familiar with the potter’s wheel and kiln know that many beautiful glazes contain metallic salts, such as chromium. The radioactive stuff, much of which is metal, is ground up and mixed with clay and then high-fired, with the expectation that the resulting ceramics will last a long time. But one problem is that the production of these ceramics produces its own wastes, which are either emitted from smokestacks or dumped into water, just like the radioactive chemicals from my radioecology course. And some of this wastewater has been allowed by the French government to flow into the English Channel.
The World Nuclear Association argues that the amount of radioactive waste is not that big or bad. It points out that a typical nuclear power plant produces about 30 tons of radioactive waste annually, but when this is converted into vitrified wastes, it takes up a rather small volume, about 3 or 4 cubic yards, and that this material can then be stored in ponds at a nuclear power facility.31 “Some 90% of the world’s used fuel is stored thus and some of it has been there for decades,” WNA reports. And that organization points out that the radioactive elements decay and become less radioactive over time, so that “after 40–50 years the heat and radioactivity have fallen to one-thousandth of the level at removal.”
But environmental groups tell quite a different story. Greenpeace points out that France has a major nuclear-waste holding facility at La Hague in Normandy that contains 1.4 million containers of radioactive wastes. And although by French law no international dumping of radioactive wastes is supposed to occur, Greenpeace states that “an estimated 140,000 containers of nuclear waste disposed at La Hague came from foreign nuclear utilities in Europe and Japan.”32 Greenpeace claims that dairy cattle are drinking water contaminated with radioactive materials from this facility, and that even French Champagne is being contaminated by radioactive material from it.33 Greenpeace says the French government was informed by the company managing the waste facility that a fissure had occurred in one of the storage containers due to ground-water erosion.34
What seems to be happening is that the containers and their surrounding facilities were constructed in the belief that groundwater would not be a powerful enough erosive force, but in fact it is.
Could nuclear power plants lead to disaster?
They could, and in a few cases a few have, primarily because anything operated by people is subject to human error. Surgeons, lawyers, presidents, generals, pilots, air-traffic controllers, engineers, scientists—you name it, we all make mistakes: A patient dies, an innocent person goes to jail, the country goes to hell, a platoon gets wiped out, planes collide, and bridges fall down. The problem with human error in managing nuclear power, and the transportation and storage of nuclear waste, is the enormity and longevity of the potential harm. The effects may be local/regional, another Chernobyl; with breeder reactors, a nuclear war; terrorism; or long-term contamination of air, land, and water due to leaks, dangerous explosions, and radioactive fallout.
Why the small investor should not invest in nuclear power
In 1957, the state of Washington started the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), which soon became known as WHOOPS, for reasons that will become obvious. It was touted as a wonderful, modern way to ensure an ample supply of electrical power for the people of the state, using the newly emerging technology of the nuclear power reactor. WPPSS, a public corporation set up by the state to build and operate nuclear plants, allowed publicly owned utilities to combine resources and build power-generation facilities.
Unbelievably, those chosen to be the directors and managers of the WPPSS system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in large projects. As a result, things went very wrong. One contractor shown to be incompetent was retained for more work anyway. Initial designs turned out to be too dangerous and unreliable. Contractors made mistakes, so some parts of reactors were rebuilt many times. Costs skyrocketed.
By the early 1980s, with not a single plant working, the cost of the entire project reached an estimated $14 billion, and the WPPSS board stopped construction. Because the nonoperating plants brought in no money, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion due in bonds. And who was stuck with the bond debts? A lot of small investors who had trusted a state bond issue to be a safe way to save for retirement. In some small towns where unemployment due to the recession was already high, this amounted to more than $12,000 per customer.
There were lots of bondholders, and they sued, as did various parties involved in the design and construction, who sued each other, and the matter wound its way through the courts for 13 years. In 1988 the parties settled for $753 million. That settlement involved 30,000 bondholders, some of whom got as little as 10–40 cents on each dollar they had invested.
Two famous nuclear disasters
Three Mile Island
Although nuclear engineers and big power companies have said for years that nuclear reactors are safe, the reality is that nuclear reactors emit considerable, undesirable amounts of radiation into the environment even during “normal” operation, and when mistakes are made, they have led to some spectacular disasters.
One of the most dramatic events in the history of U.S. radiation pollution occurred on March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The malfunction of a valve, along with human errors, resulted in a partial core meltdown—the neat lineup of rods of uranium and graphite and the materials holding them got so hot that the whole thing melted, releasing intense radiation into the interior of the containment structure. This kind of accident was precisely what the containment structure was designed to contain, and it mostly did. Still, some radiation was released into the environment. Three days after the accident, radiation levels near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant were six times higher than the natural background radiation. (There is always some radiation in our environment, some coming from outer space as cosmic rays, some from naturally occurring radioisotopes in the soil and bedrock.)
Since the long-term chronic effects of exposure to low levels of radiation are not well understood, the effects of Three Mile Island exposure, although apparently small, are difficult to estimate. However, the incident revealed many potential problems with the way U.S. society has dealt with nuclear power.
Since nuclear power had been considered relatively safe, the state of Pennsylvania was unprepared to deal with an accident. For example, there was no state bureau for radiation help, and the state Department of Health did not have a single book on radiation medicine. (The medical library had been dismantled two years earlier for budgetary reasons.) One of the major impacts of the incident was fear; yet there was no state office of mental health, and no staff member from the Department of Health was allowed to sit in on important discussions following the accident.
Chernobyl
The worst nuclear power plant accident occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl in Ukraine (which was then part of the Soviet Union). The World Health Organization estimates that 4,000 people have died as a direct result of this accident.35 Experts estimate that this release will cause 39,000 cancer deaths in Europe over a period of 50 years following the accident.
Lack of preparedness to deal with a serious nuclear power plant accident was dramatically illustrated by events that began unfolding on Monday morning, April 28, 1986. Workers at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, frantically searching for the source of elevated levels of radiation near their plant, concluded that it was not their installation that was leaking radiation but that radioactivity was coming from the Soviet Union by way of prevailing winds. Confronted, the Soviets announced that an accident had occurred at a nuclear power plant at Chernobyl two days earlier, on April 26. This was the first notice to the world of the worst accident in the history of nuclear power generation.
It is speculated that the system that supplied cooling waters for the Chernobyl reactor failed as a result of human error, causing the temperature of the reactor core to rise to more than 3,000°C (about 5,400°F) and melting the uranium fuel. Explosions blew off the top of the building over the reactor, and the graphite surrounding the fuel rods used to moderate the nuclear reactions in the core ignited. Some reports suggest that the energy of the blast was 200 times greater than that released by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs taken together.36 The fire produced a cloud of radioactive particles that rose high into the atmosphere. Within a short time, there were 237 confirmed cases of acute radiation sickness, and 31 people died.
In the days following the accident, nearly 3 billion people in the Northern Hemisphere received varying amounts of radiation from Chernobyl. With the exception of the 30-km (19-mi) zone surrounding Chernobyl, global human exposure was relatively small. Even in Europe, where exposure was highest, it was considerably less than the natural radiation people receive during the course of a year. In that 30-km zone around Chernobyl, however, about 115,000 people were evacuated; and as many as 24,000 people were estimated to have received a dangerous dose. We are told that this group of people is being studied carefully.
One apparent effect is that since the accident the number of childhood thyroid cancer cases per year has risen steadily in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation (the three countries most affected by Chernobyl). In 1994 a combined rate of 132 new thyroid cancer cases were identified. Since the accident, a total of 1,036 thyroid cancer cases have been diagnosed in children under 15. These cases are believed to be linked to the released radiation from the accident, although other factors, such as environmental pollution, may also play a role. It is predicted that a few percent of the roughly 1 million children exposed to the radiation will eventually develop thyroid cancer.
Outside the 30-km zone, the increased risk of cancer is very small and not likely to be detected from an ecological evaluation. Nevertheless, according to one estimate, Chernobyl will ultimately be responsible for an additional 16,000 deaths worldwide.
Chernobyl had other environmental effects as well. Vegetation within 7 km of the power plant was either killed or severely damaged by the accident. Pine trees examined in 1990 around Chernobyl showed extensive tissue damage and still contained radioactivity. The distance between annual rings (a measure of tree growth) had decreased since 1986.
Interestingly, scientists returning to the evacuated zone in the mid-1990s found, to their surprise, thriving and expanding animal populations. In the absence of people, species such as wild boar, moose, otters, waterfowl, and rodents were enjoying a population boom. The wild boar population had increased tenfold since the evacuation of people. Still, these species may be paying a genetic price for living within the contaminated zone. A study of gene mutations in meadow voles (also called field mice) within the zone found more than 5 mutations per animal, compared with a rate of only 0.4 per animal outside the zone. It is puzzling to scientists that the high mutation rate has not crippled the animal populations, but it appears so far that the benefit of excluding humans outweighs the negative effects of radioactive contamination.
In the areas surrounding Chernobyl, radioactive materials continue to contaminate soils, vegetation, surface water, and groundwater, presenting a hazard to plants and animals. The evacuation zone may be uninhabitable for a very long time unless some way is found to remove the radioactivity. For example, 5 km from Chernobyl, the city of Prypyat, which had a population of 48,000 at the time of the accident, is today a “ghost city,” abandoned, with blocks of vacant apartment buildings and rusting vehicles. Roads are cracking and trees are growing as new vegetation transforms the urban land back to green fields. Cases of thyroid cancer are still increasing, and the number of cases is many times higher for people who lived as children in Prypyat at the time of the accident.
The final story of the world’s most serious nuclear accident is yet to completely unfold. Estimates of the total cost of the Chernobyl accident vary widely, but it will probably exceed $200 billion.37
Although the Soviets were accused of not giving attention to reactor safety and of using outdated equipment, people still wonder whether such an accident could happen again elsewhere. Because there are several hundred reactors producing power in the world today, and because given enough time human error is almost inevitable, the answer has to be yes. About ten accidents have released radioactive particles during the past 34 years. Although the probability of a serious accident is very small at a particular site, the consequences may be great. Whether this poses an unacceptable risk to society is really not so much a scientific issue as a political one involving a question of values.
Dead trees standing: a story about nuclear radiation
What is it like to be in a place that has been subjected for years to radiation of the kind a nuclear power plant or its waste would release if a spill or operating accident occurred? I can tell you what it’s like because I worked as part of a team on a little-known, curious experiment conducted in the 1960s and ‘70s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. There, scientists exposed a natural forest to radiation for 15 years to see what a nuclear war or the accidental or deliberate release of radioactive materials might do to one of nature’s ecosystems. The experiment was done because during the Cold War the danger of a nuclear war seemed real.
So that scientists could work in the irradiated forest, the laboratory had moved the largest hunk of cesium-137 that could be safely handled by earthmoving machinery into the forest and mounted it on a vertical, movable pole that could be lowered into the ground and covered by lead shielding to protect the researchers, then raised up again automatically from a safe distance. We could work in the forest up to four hours a day because cesium’s radioactive isotope-137 was relatively “clean”—only gamma rays were produced. The result appears in Figure 5.6.
Figure 5.6 The irradiated forest after about 10 years of exposure to intense radioactivity. (Top) From the air—the dead trees standing are visible and the bare ground beneath them. (Bottom) And near ground zero. (Top photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory; bottom photo by Daniel B. Botkin)
Eight years after the radiation began, I entered the forest to do my day’s fieldwork, studying how the radiation was affecting the growth of trees. When all the trees are killed in an ordinary forest—say, by a disease, an insect outbreak, or a prolonged period of drought or of freezing temperatures—most of the trees soon fall over and decay. Mounds of rich organic humus, the product of that decay, are left, and soon tree seedlings and saplings sprout along with flowers and grasses adapted to open areas. Life begins anew among the dead.
But that wasn’t the way Brookhaven National Laboratory’s irradiated forest looked that day. The strange thing was that although the trees had been dead for years, the forest looked as if it had burned just the day before. The trees were still standing, leafless, gray and brown, because the bacteria and fungi that decompose wood were killed, too, as were the insects and worms that help with decomposition. And nothing grew anew except in small triangles of “shade” where the dead trees standing protected small patches of ground from the radioactive cesium. Behind these trees, small but hardy sedges were about a foot or two high.
A journey to the center of the forest—that is, to the source of radiation—after almost a decade of exposure was surreal. The forest was enclosed by two chain-link fences with locked gates. Just inside the fences, the woods were typical of those found on Long Island: a dense clutch of small pitch pines, scarlet and white oaks, and small shrubs, mostly blueberry and huckleberry. Many plants were quite fragrant. The sounds of crickets and cicadas filled the air. Ovenbirds called.
My walk toward the source thus began as a pleasant stroll through the woods. As I moved closer to the center, more and more pine trees had dead branches and needles. Farther on, all the pines were dead, but many were still standing. Some of the fallen pine trunks were beginning to rot—the bacteria and fungi of decay at the distance from the cesium had survived the radiation.
Up ahead, the white oaks looked sick. A bit farther on, the white oaks, too, were all dead and standing. The scarlet oaks proved to be the hardiest of the trees. As I neared the source, I saw some survivors.
It was like walking up a mountain. The higher you climb, the smaller and fewer the trees. Eventually, the trees drop out completely and you reach a zone of low shrubs, then a tundra zone of smaller ground plants, and finally, if the mountain is high enough, no visible life at all.
So it was in the irradiated forest. Blueberries and huckleberries survived the trees, growing among grasses and sedges. Closer to the source, only a patchy cover of sedges. Then you came upon perfect triangles of sedges, green, grasslike, flowering plants growing behind the trunks of standing dead trees. Just as they do with sunlight, the trunks shaded the sedges from the radiation. It was an eerie demonstration of how light rays travel.
Near ground zero, all plants were dead, but they had not decayed. The radiation had killed off the armies of decay: fungus, bacteria, earthworms, and so forth. I hunted around for any signs of life. Within about six feet of the source, I found, on the back of a sign warning of the radiation danger, a small green patch of the algae Protococcus, which grows on damp soils. The sandy soil encircling the source was tinted gray, the color of the dead leaves and twigs that had not decayed.
From the air, the forest was an eerily beautiful sight of death radiating outward. You could see the tower containing the radiation, surrounded by a lifeless gray-tan zone. Then came a circular ring of sedges, one of shrubs, another of oaks without pines, and then the healthy forest. Rather than the intricate mosaic of life-forms that characterizes normal forests, the pattern at Brookhaven was a series of concentric circles signifying the stages of death by radiation.
The radioactive waste generated at nuclear power plants and the problems associated with the transportation and storage of nuclear wastes can create equally mournful landscapes. For this reason, the irradiated forest at Brookhaven National Laboratory should make us pause and think carefully before we move in the direction of greater emphasis on nuclear power rather than on energy sources that are more environmentally benign.
For those who are interested: more background
What is nuclear energy?
For most of us, nuclear energy is exotic and strange, so it may be helpful to go over some of the basics here. Nuclear energy is the energy of the atomic nucleus, released by splitting atoms, a tricky business done inside what are called nuclear reactors. In the United States, almost all these reactors use a form of uranium oxide as fuel.
Three types, or isotopes, of uranium occur in nature. Unfortunately, the one that is useful in conventional nuclear reactors—uranium-235—is relatively rare, making up about 0.7% of the uranium found on Earth. Most uranium—99.3% of all natural uranium—is uranium-238. The third type, also not used in conventional reactors, is uranium-234, which makes up about 0.005%. The first step in making useful uranium fuel is to concentrate uranium-235 from 0.7% to about 3%.
Uranium atoms split naturally, releasing energy, nuclear fragments, and neutrons. The neutrons go out and split other uranium atoms. Here’s one of the tricky bits: If too much U-235 is brought together, lots of neutrons are produced, and there is a chain reaction that gets away. This is how an atomic bomb works, and in a reactor a runaway reaction can produce enough heat to melt the machinery and the building and emit dangerous radioactive material into the atmosphere and water. If the U-235 is not concentrated enough, not much happens, so the goal is to get just enough U-235 splitting and producing neutrons. This is done by finding a way to control the reactions: If things get going too fast, to take away the excess neutrons; if too slow, to let more neutrons fly around.
Neutrons are controlled, or “moderated,” both to slow them down so they are more likely to split atoms and to control the rate of reactions. Most nuclear power plants use a combination of graphite rods and huge bathtubs of water to control and contain the reactions. Water is a good absorber of the neutrons. An eerie thing to do is to visit a bathtub reactor where you can stand on an iron grating above a very deep pool of water, as I have done. You look down and see an intense blue glow where all that atomic reaction is going on. If you were down there where the blue light is, you’d be dead. It’s sort of like looking into the devil’s mouth, I thought, standing there.
The energy from splitting uranium atoms is used to heat water and make steam, which then runs a steam turbine that generates electricity. Coal- and gas-fired electrical generators do the same thing, just using a different source of heat to boil water.
There are three kinds of nuclear reactors—conventional, breeder, and fusion—and each has its own drawbacks:
• Conventional: The fuel is limited; as I wrote earlier, there is only a 40-year supply or less for the world. Therefore, it is not a long-term solution.
• Breeder: Bombs can be made from the fuels.
• Fusion: This actually doesn’t exist yet, and may never, so it cannot now be considered a potential solution.
The reactor is a complicated machine, full of pumps, pipes, very corrosive materials, lots of wires, and a lot of mechanisms to shut things down if something goes wrong. In the reactor core, fuel pins, consisting of enriched uranium pellets in hollow tubes (3–4m long and less than 1cm, or 0.4 in., in diameter), are packed together (40,000 or more in a reactor) in fuel subassemblies. A minimum fuel concentration is necessary to keep the reactor critical—that is, to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction. A stable fission chain reaction in the core is maintained by controlling the number of neutrons that cause fission. The control rods, which contain materials that capture neutrons, are used to regulate the chain reaction. As the control rods are moved out of the core, the chain reaction quickens; as they are moved into the core, the reaction slows. Full insertion of the control rods into the core stops the fission reaction.
The coolant removes heat produced by the fission. The rate of heat generation in the fuel must match the rate at which heat is carried away by the coolant. All major nuclear accidents have occurred when something went wrong with the balance, allowing heat to build up in the reactor core.
In a meltdown, the nuclear fuel becomes so hot that it creates a molten mass that breaches the walls of the reactor and contaminates the environment.
Nuclear power reactors, each of which produces about 1,000MW of electricity, require an extensive set of pumps and backup equipment to ensure that adequate cooling is available to the reactor. Smaller reactors can be designed with cooling systems that work by gravity and are thus not as vulnerable to pump failure caused by power loss. Such cooling systems are said to have passive stability, and the reactors are said to be passively safe.
The bottom line
• Conventional nuclear power plants are not a short-term solution to the energy problem, because they take too long to build. They are also not a long-term solution, because nuclear plants have short lives and their fuel is a rare mineral that will run out in decades.
• Their radioactive wastes, however, will be with us for thousands of years, and there is no satisfactory solution to dealing with these wastes.
• Although governments and international agencies say nuclear waste is being handled safely, evidence suggests the contrary. In particular, ground water is more erosive than engineers expected and has corroded some facilities, allowing radioactive water to escape into the ground and then contaminate surface water.
• Nuclear power is expensive, but many of the costs are indirect and thus not evident: for example, development of atomic reactors has been funded primarily by governments, as is dealing with the wastes and the cleanup when contamination occurs.
• No insurance company will insure a nuclear power plant. As a result, governments are responsible for any damage and lawsuits—another hidden cost.
• Nuclear power plants have had only a few major accidents, but these have been costly.
• Exploration and prospecting for uranium ore will probably increase greatly, especially in remote, relatively unexplored areas, raising new problems for conservation of biological diversity, along with environmental pollution and, locally, human health.
• In sum, nuclear energy is a cure worse than the disease. And since there are alternative sources of abundant energy that don’t pose the hazards of nuclear power, why take the unnecessary risks that it entails?