Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Energy

  • Nuclear is Uneconomical

    Existing technologies for more efficient end-use can save three-fourths of U.S. electricity at an average cost of around 1 cent per kilowatt-hour–cheaper than running a coal or nuclear power plant, let alone building one. Scores of utilities have demonstrated and implemented at scale, rapid, large, predictable, and extremely cheap “negawatts” (saved electricity). California’s per-capita use of electricity has been flat for 30 years while per-capita real income rose 79 percent. Firms like DuPont, Dow, and IBM are saving billions of dollars by cutting energy intensity, sometimes as fast as 6-8 percent a year.

    My household saves 90 percent of electricity and 99 percent of space and water heating energy with a 10-month payback using 1983 technology. My team’s redesign of some $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors normally finds energy savings of 30-60 percent in retrofits (paying back in about 2-3 years) and 40-90 percent in new installations (typically with lower capital cost). A detailed road map for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit (“Winning the Oil Endgame”), shows how to save half of U.S. oil and gas at average costs one-fifth and one-eighth of current prices. Implementation is already underway. And each of the 60-80 known obstacles to implementing energy efficiency can be turned into a business opportunity.

    On the supply side, “micropower”–small-scale generation that emits little or no carbon dioxide–provided one-sixth of the world’s electricity and one-third of its new electricity in 2005, meeting from one-sixth to more than one-half of all electrical needs in 13 industrial countries. The smaller of micropower’s components, distributed renewable sources of electricity, was a $56 billion global equipment market in 2006, while the larger, combined-heat-and-power, was probably even larger. Micropower added four times the electricity and 8-11 times the capacity that nuclear power added globally in 2005, now produces more electricity than nuclear power does, and is financed by private risk capital. Micropower plus “negawatts,” which are probably about as big, now provide more than half of the world’s new electrical services.

    Nuclear power is unnecessary and uneconomic, so we needn’t debate its safety. As retirements of aging plants overwhelm construction, global capacity and output will decline (as they did slightly in 2006). Most independent analysts doubt the private capital market will finance any new nuclear plants. Even in the United States, where new subsidies would roughly repay the next six units’ entire capital cost, Standard & Poor’s said this wouldn’t materially improve the builders’ credit ratings. I expect this experiment will be like defibrillating a corpse: It’ll jump, but it won’t revive.

    Nuclear power’s market meltdown is good for global development: Saving electricity needs around 1,000 times less capital and repays it about 10 times faster than supplying more electricity. Shifting capital to saving electricity can potentially turn the power sector (now gobbling one-fourth of global development capital) into a net funder of other development needs. Further, an efficient, diverse, dispersed, and renewable energy system can make major supply failures, whether caused by accident or malice, impossible by design rather than (as now) inevitable by design.

    The nuclear phaseout will also speed climate protection, because buying negawatts and micropower instead will save 2-10 times more carbon per dollar, and will do so more quickly. And it can belatedly stem nuclear proliferation, too, by removing from commerce a vast flow of ingredients of do-it-yourself bomb kits in civilian disguise.

    This would make bomb ingredients harder to get, more conspicuous to try to get, and far costlier politically if caught trying to get, because the motive for wanting them would be unmasked as unambiguously military. Focusing intelligence resources on needles, not haystacks, would also improve the odds of timely warning. All this wouldn’t make proliferation impossible, but it would make things far more difficult for both recipients and suppliers.

    Thus, acknowledging and accepting the market collapse of nuclear power is an important step toward a fairer, richer, cooler, and safer world.

    Amory B. Lovins is the Cofounder, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

  • Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed “No Nukes!”

    The massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly killed millions in a nuclear apocalypse.
    It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted that “the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant’s builders had underestimated the strength of possible earthquakes in the region.”
    There are 55 reactors in Japan. Virtually all of them are on or near major earthquake faults. Kashiwazaki alone hosts seven, four of which were forced into the dangerous SCRAM mode to narrowly avoid meltdowns. At least 50 separate serious problems have been so far identified, including fire and the spillage of barrels filled with radioactive wastes.
    There are four active reactors in California on or near major earthquake faults, as are the two at Indian Point north of New York City. On January 31, 1986, an earthquake struck the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, knocking out roads and bridges, as well as pipes within the plant, which (thankfully) was not operating at the time. The governor of Ohio, then Richard Celeste, sued to keep Perry shut, but lost in federal court.
    The fault that hit Perry is an off-shoot of the powerful New Madrid line that runs through the Mississippi River Valley, threatening numerous reactors. The Beyond Nuclear Project reports that in August, 2004, a quake hit the Dresden reactor in Illinois, resulting in a leak of radioactive tritium. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, slated as the nation’s high-level radioactive waste dump, has a visible fault line running through it.
    More than 400 atomic reactors are on-line worldwide. How many are vulnerable to seismic shocks we can only shudder to guess. But one-eighth of them sit in one of the world’s richest, most technologically advanced, most densely populated industrial nations, which has now admitted its reactor designs cannot match the power an earthquake that has just happened.

    In whatever language it’s said, that translates into the unmistakable warning that the world’s atomic reactors constitute a multiple, ticking seismic time bomb. Talk of building more can only be classified as suicidal irresponsibility.
    Tokyo Electric’s behavior since the quake defines the industry’s credibility. For three consecutive days (with more undoubtedly to come) the utility has been forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more.
    Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.
    Prior to the March 28, 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island, the industry for years assured the public that the kind of accident that did happen was “impossible.”
    Then the utility repeatedly assured the public there had been no melt-down of fuel and no danger of further catastrophe. Nine years later a robotic camera showed that nearly all the fuel had melted, and that avoiding a full-blown catastrophe was little short of a miracle.
    The industry continues to say no one was killed at TMI. But it does not know how much radiation was released, where it went or who it might have harmed. Since 1979 its allies in the courts have denied 2400 central Pennsylvania families the right to test their belief that they and their loved ones have been killed and maimed en masse.
    Prior to its April 26, 1986, explosion, Soviet Life Magazine ran a major feature extolling the virtually “accident-proof design” of Chernobyl Unit Four.
    Then the former Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev kept secret the gargantuan radiation releases that have killed thousands and yielded a horrific plague of cancers, leukemia, birth defects and more throughout the region, and among the more than 800,000 drafted “jumpers” who were forced to run through the plant to clean it up.
    Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the industry has claimed its reactors can withstand the effects of a jet crash, and are immune to sabotage. The claims are as patently absurd as the lies about TMI and Chernobyl.

    So, too, the endless, dogged assurances from Japan that no earthquake could do to Kashiwazaki what has just happened.
    Yet today and into the future, expensive ads will flood the US and global airwaves, full of nonsense about the “need” for new nukes.

    There is only one thing we know for certain about this advertising: it is a lie.
    Atomic reactors contribute to global warming rather than abating it. In construction, in the mining, milling and enriching of the fuel, in on-going “normal” releases of heat and radioactivity, in dismantling and decommissioning, in managing radioactive wastes, in future terror attacks, in proliferation of nuke weapons, and much much more, atomic energy is an unmitigated eco-disaster.
    To this list we must now add additional tangible evidence that reactors allegedly built to withstand “worst case” earthquakes in fact cannot. And when they go down, the investment is lost, and power shortages arise (as is now happening in Japan) that are filled by the burning of fossil fuels.
    It costs up to ten times as much to produce energy from a nuke as to save it with efficiency. Advances in wind, solar and other green “Solartopian” technologies mean atomic energy simply cannot compete without massive subsidies, loan guarantees and government insurance to protect it from catastrophes to come.
    This latest “impossible” earthquake has not merely shattered the alleged safeguards of Japan’s reactor fleet. It has blown apart—yet again—any possible argument for building more reactors anywhere on this beleaguered Earth.

     

    Harvey Wasserman helped co-ordinate media for the Clamshell Alliance, 1976-8. He was arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1984 and at Seabrook in 1989. He is author of “Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030.”

  • Japanese Earthquake Triggers Faults at Nuclear Power Plant

    Report by Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) (Original document is at www.nirs.org/international/asia/reportonearthquakedamage71907.pdf)

    In the early hours following the July 16 earthquake in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, when Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) was reporting only a transformer fire and spill of 1.5 liters of radioactive water, NIRS criticized TEPCO for being slow to report information and told the Associated Press that we were waiting “for the other shoe to drop.”

    That sound you hear is the rumble of an entire shoe factory tumbling to the ground.

    It is now clear that the damage to the world’s largest nuclear power facility was far greater than initially reported and that radiation releases were also far greater than reported. Indeed, it appears that radiation releases are continuing today (July 19, 2007). According to a report from Bloomberg News (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aCWh.1vTk3_Y&refer=home), 402 million Becquerels of radioactivity already have been released, although this government-supplied figure likely understates the reality, as radiation apparently continues to be released into the environment.

    According to the Associated Press (www.pr-inside.com/a-look-at-problems-found-at-r174712.htm) on July 17, damage to the reactors was extensive. The AP found the following problems listed at that time:

    A list of malfunctions at the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariya nuclear power plant in northwestern Japan following a powerful earthquake this week:

    • Fire at an electrical transformer facility.
    • 1,200 liters of water containing radioactive material leaked into sea.
    • About 100 barrels of radioactive waste knocked over in storage facility.
    • Duct knocked out of place in major vent; possible leak of radioactive cobalt-60 and chromium-51 from five of the plant’s reactors.
    • Water leak inside buildings housing all seven reactors.
    • Malfunctioning of water intake screening pump at two reactors.
    • Blowout panel knocked down at turbine buildings at two reactors.
    • Oil leak from low-activation transformer waste oil pipes at two reactors.
    • Loss in water-tight seal at reactor core cooling system.
    • Water leaks from diesel generator facility, burst extinguisher pipe, burst condenser valve and filtration tank.
    • Broken connections and broken bolt at electric transformer.
    • Loss of power at control center for liquid waste disposal facility.
    • Oil leaks from damaged transformer and magnetic transformer facility.
    • Oil leak at reactor water supply pump facility.
    • Disrupted electrical connection at magnetic transformer facility.
    • Cracks in embankment of water intake facility.
    • Air and oil leaks at switching stations.
    • Land under parts of plant turned to mud in quake-caused process known as liquefaction.

    However, as of July 19, we now know that some 400, not 100, barrels of radioactive waste were knocked over, and about 40 lost their lids. At least some of the waste was liquid, and leaked into the building, according to Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC) in Japan (for more information on nuclear power in Japan, visit their website at http://cnic.jp/english/). It is not known whether radiation from these spills has leaked outside the building.

    The 1200 liters (about 317 gallons) of radioactive water spilled into the Sea of Japan apparently came from the irradiated fuel pool at Unit 6 at the site. This is one of the two newer units: it is a 1315 MW General Electric/Toshiba Boiling Water Reactor that came online in November 1996.

    According to Japanese officials, the newest reactor at the site, a 1315 MW GE/Hitachi Boiling Water Reactor that came online in July 1997, has been venting radioactive steam into the air since the earthquake began, and continues to do so today (July 19). We have been unable to determine radiation levels of these releases.

    The earthquake exceeded the design basis for the reactors, and the facility does not meet new Japanese earthquake standards put in place in September 2006. Moreover, the fault that caused the quake is apparently directly underneath the facility site, and was not discovered prior to construction. It is not yet known whether this fault is capable of an even larger earthquake than the 6.8 measured on July 16.

    In a July 17 statement, CNIC said, “In just two years three earthquakes (off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture on 16 August 2005, off the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on 25 March 2007, and now this one) have exceeded the “extreme design earthquake” assumed at the time the plants were built. In September 2006, for the first time in 28 years, the Nuclear Safety Commission revised Japan’s earthquake guidelines. Japan’s nuclear power companies are now carrying out earthquake safety checks on the basis of the new guidelines. By rights, all nuclear power plants should be shut down until these checks have been completed.”

    All of the reactors at Kashiwasaki Kariwa currently are shutdown and likely will be so for a long time to come as additional damage comes to light and its ability to withstand future earthquakes comes further into question. Initial projections are that the reactors will be closed for at least a year, and it is highly possible they will never reopen. Already, the earthquake has caused TEPCO to lose $4.3 Billion of its market value, according to Bloomberg. A lengthy shutdown of the world’s largest nuclear facility will undoubtedly cause far greater cost to the utility.

    Ironically, TEPCO’s website touts its nuclear program, and states as its number one priority in restoring public confidence in that program, “Promoting disclosure of information and ensuring transparency of nuclear operations.” Clearly, TEPCO’s commitment to transparency is no more than a slogan and it is unlikely public confidence will ever be regained.

    For the United States, the lesson is unmistakable: the earthquake reminds us of the fragility and danger of nuclear power and its ability to withstand the acts of Mother Nature. Nuclear reactors and earthquake faults simply don’t mix. An immediate need is to permanently end any further discussion of installation of dry cask radioactive waste storage units at the Diablo Canyon site on California’s earthquake-prone Pacific coast.

    NIRS will attempt to update this report as events warrant.

    The Kashiwasaki Kariwa facility consists of seven Boiling Water Reactors. Three are of Toshiba design and are 1067 MW each. Unit 1 came online in September 1985, Unit 2 in September 1990 and Unit 3 in August 1993. Two are Hitachi reactors of 1067 MW each: Unit 4 came online in August 1994 and Unit 5 in April 1990. Unit 6, a GE/Toshiba BWR of 1315 MW, came online in November 1996 and Unit 7, a 1315 MW GE/Hitachi BWR came online in July 1997. Taken together, until July 16, 2007, these represented the world’s largest nuclear power facility.

     

    Michael Mariotte, July 19, 2007 Nuclear Information and Resource Service 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 340 Takoma Park, MD 20912 301-270-6477 nirsnet@nirs.org, www.nirs.org

  • Why Nuclear is Nonsense

    Ever heard the story of Chicken Licken? One day, whilst walking in the woods, an acorn fell on Chicken Licken’s head. ‘Oh no!’ Cried Chicken Licken ‘the sky is falling in. We’re all doomed.’ In a state of panic, Chicken-Licken ran off to warn his friends.Duck Luck, Turkey Lurkey, Hen Len and Goose Loose were all told the terrible news and joined in the state of panic.

    As the animals ran round in an increasing state of agitation salvation suddenly seemed to appear in the form of Fox Lox. ‘Don’t worry’ said the fox ‘I will provide you shelter. Come with me and we will all be safe’. So the animals duly followed Fox Lox to his home and made their way underground into the shelter of his lair. This came as great news to Fox Lox’s family, who couldn’t believe that lunch had walked into their home on its own two feet.

    A great feast was had, but the sky had never been falling in. The lesson we offer to our children from this fable is that if you allow yourself to be thrown into a panic by stupid, irrational ideas you bring about your own, self-inflicted, disasters. So it is with the Prime Minister’s claims that nuclear power is back with a vengeance and that it is our only hope of addressing both energy security and the challenge of Climate Change.

    Let us be clear about where we are now. If you, me or Chicken Licken wanted to we could go out and build a nuclear power station today. Nothing in existing energy market rules prevents this. It is simply that the economics of nuclear power do not stack up and never have done. The generation that believed that nuclear would provide ‘atoms for free’, ‘energy too cheap to meter’ soon discovered that nuclear power has never broken even let alone reduced energy costs. The scale of its costs was only ever masked by subsidies from the defence budget for nuclear weapons grade material. It was the nuclear arms race that kept the show on the road.

    Today, we know that the clean-up costs for the last generation of nuclear waste will be between £56 – £80 billion until the year 2080. We are yet to have estimates of the cost beyond that date. The nuclear lobby has only been rejuvenated by the Government’s decision that the taxpayer should meet these costs rather than the industry itself. So much for competitive markets.

    Blair’s announcement that nuclear is back with a vengeance needs therefore to be read in the coded terms that his pronouncements usually require. What it means is that the taxpayer will be asked to fork out huge subsidies for the changes that appear to make nuclear economically viable. In Finland, it meant the Government agreeing that the industry would only be liable for its waste for the first 30 years. The tax payer will take responsibility for the 1000 that follow.

    The danger is not just in the inherent stupidity of Blair’s claims, but in the knowledge that the nuclear industry will run off with the cash for all other energy options. So, before going down this path, just look at the economics of other choices. MPs have recently had a briefing about the construction, within the North Sea, of an offshore super-grid of wind generators. It would cost less than £2 million to construct, but with larger costs of around £1.5 billion for the construction of an internal grid. In total it would deliver 10 GW of energy – the equivalent of four nuclear power stations. It could supply carbon-free energy for Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (the three countries they are seeking to involve in the project).

    Even if you do a value for money comparison of existing energy choices, the nuclear option comes out as a very poor choice. For every pound you put into nuclear the energy output from other sources is streets ahead.

    Wind power gives you up to 1.7 times more kilowatt hours per pound and so does gas fired industrial co- generation. Combined Heat and Power systems in people’s homes gives up to 6.5 times as many kilowatt hours and the ‘heat from waste’ systems give up to 9 times as much energy. Most profitable of all are the savings that come from simply reducing the amount of energy we currently throw away. Here – in the area people call ‘negawatts’ – you can get 10 times more for your money than in any pursuit of the nuclear folly.

    Britain currently throws away twice as much energy as the country uses. We do so in a hopelessly inefficient generating system and National Grid. Already, other parts of continental Europe have moved into decentralised energy systems that are infinitely more efficient. Denmark has 50% of its national energy needs met from decentralised energy and the Netherlands has over 60%. By far the most adventurous country in the EU is Germany. It is creating new markets in renewable energy systems that are likely to steal a march on almost everyone else.

    Some 80% of the new buildings going up in Berlin generate their own energy. This isn’t because German citizens have suddenly become ethically enlightened in a way that rest of us haven’t. It follows directly from the Renewable Energies Act passed in Germany in 2004. What the Germans did was to change the market rules. People now get paid four times as much for energy that they supply into the energy system (from renewable resources) as for the energy they take out. Suddenly it becomes profitable for developers to include energy generation in every building they put up. Little surprise then that Germany should have 88% of the current EU market for installed photovoltaic energy systems.

    A sad reality, discovered by almost all of those who seek to incorporate renewable energy systems into their own homes in the UK, is that virtually all of the technology and know-how has to be imported. Germany has created a market, for both its manufacturing and for the skill training of its young people, that Britain barely seems to comprehend. Blair’s obsession with light touch regulation and non intervention in markets basically throws manufacturing to the wolves and skill training out of the window. It is the refusal to lead into genuinely sustainable alternatives that allows Bair to run with ‘the sky is falling in’ declaration that nuclear is the answer.

    Many in the country (and the Party) believe that Blair had sold his soul to the nuclear lobby some time ago.It was just a question of softening up the public into acceptance and getting rid of ministers who might put up a coherent case against him. It is, however, an option locked into the follies of the past rather than visions of the future; the delusions of someone who clearly needs to get out more.

    Despite Blair’s promise that he would learn to listen more, following Labour’s losses in the local government elections and our collapse of support in the opinion polls, it is clear that he continues to listen only to the corporate lobbyists who have led Labour into much of the mess we now face. The Prime Minister has clearly entered the David Icke phase of his political career, believing in his own ability to walk on waffle. Perhaps it is the time for Blair to get out too.

    In Parliament, Alan is a leading campaigner on wide ranging issues about the environment and the economy. The New Statesman dubbed him, “The man most likely to come up with the ideas”. He has consistently put the multinational GM food companies on the defensive and fought for a safer, healthier environment. Alan is also involved in anti-poverty campaigns and ones supporting industrial democracy and common ownership. He is Chair of the All Party Warm Homes Group, and Treasurer of the Socialist Campaign Group.

  • Nuclear Power: No Solution for Global Warming

    There is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of developed countries. Whatever else one could say about nuclear power in the old days, it was certainly not considered environment-friendly. Over the past few years, however, a number of so-called environmentalists, generally Western, have come out in support of nuclear power as an essential component of any practical solution to global warming. Predictably, flailing nuclear establishments everywhere have grabbed this second opportunity to make a claim for massive state investments and resurrect an industry that has collapsed in country after country due to its inability to provide clean, safe, or cheap electricity. But just as the old mantra”too cheap to meter” proved ridiculously wrong, the claims that nuclear energy can contribute significantly to mitigating climate change do not bear scrutiny.

    Most prominent of these so-called environmentalists turned pro-nuclear advocates is James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-regulating organism. Last year he entreated his”friends in the [Green] movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” Lovelock’s article had several factual errors. For example,”nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources” One wonders which of the many renewable energy sources promoted by the Green movement – photovoltaics, wind energy, and so on – has had an accident that even remotely compares with Chernobyl.

    Even more inexplicable is the assertion: “We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.” Despite such nonsense, Lovelock’s article was circulated widely, both by the nuclear lobby and by other environmentalists who were either confused or felt that this sort of argument had to be refuted strongly.

    Lovelock’s bloomers aside, the fact that some environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as a solution to global warming deserves serious consideration and response. The enormity of the potential impact of climate change adds to this imperative.

    Two implicit but flawed assumptions underlie most claims about the significance of nuclear energy for the climate-change issue. The first is that climate change can be tackled without confronting and changing Western, especially American, patterns of energy consumption – the primary causes and continuing drivers for unsustainable increases in carbon emissions and global warming. This is plain impossible; there is simply no way global warming can be stopped without significant reductions in the current energy consumption levels of Western/developed countries. Efforts by various developing countries to match these consumption levels only intensify the problem.

    The second flawed assumption is that the adoption of nuclear power will lower aggregate carbon emissions. In a strictly technical sense, each unit of electricity produced by a nuclear plant would cause the emission of fewer grams of carbon than a unit of electricity generated by thermal plants. (A false myth often propagated by the nuclear lobby is that nuclear energy is carbon free. In reality, several steps in the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to enrichment to reprocessing, emit copious amounts of greenhouse gases.) And so, the assumption goes, installing a large number of nuclear power stations will lower carbon emission rates.

    The problem is that the assumption holds true only if all else remains constant, in particular consumption levels. But that is never the case. In fact, there is no empirical evidence that increased use of nuclear power has contributed to actually reducing a country’s carbon dioxide emissions. The best case study is Japan, a strongly pro-nuclear energy country. As Japanese nuclear chemist and winner of the 1997 Right Livelihood Award, Jinzaburo Takagi pointed out, from 1965 to 1995 Japan’s nuclear plant capacity went from zero to over 40,000 MW. During the same period, carbon dioxide emissions went up from about 400 million tonnes to about 1200 million tonnes.

    There are two reasons why increased use of nuclear power does not necessarily lower carbon emissions. First, nuclear energy is best suited only to produce baseload electricity. That only constitutes a fraction of all sources of carbon emissions. Other sectors of the economy where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted, such as transportation, cannot be operated using electricity from nuclear reactors. This situation is unlikely to change anytime in the near future.

    A second and more fundamental reason is provided by John Byrnes of the University of Delaware’s Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy, who observed that nuclear technology is an expensive source of energy service and can only be economically viable in a society that relies on increasing levels of energy use. Nuclear power tends to require and promote a supply-oriented energy policy and an energy-intensive pattern of development.

    The high cost of nuclear power also means that any potential decreases in carbon emissions due to its adoption are expensive, certainly higher than energy efficiency improvements as well as other means to lower emissions from thermal power plants.

    One other argument advanced by some of these so-called environmentalists is that nuclear power is just an interim solution while better solutions are worked out. The idea is wholly at odds with the history of nuclear establishments around the world and completely underestimates the remarkable capabilities of powerful institutions to find resources for continuing existence and growth. Once such institutions are established, they will find ways to ensure that they are not disempowered.

    For nuclear power to make a significant dent in global warming, nuclear capacity must grow manifold (ten-plus). The notion that nuclear power can increase manifold from current levels and then be phased out is wishful thinking, to say the least. Such a projection also completely ignores existing realities – uncompetitive costs, safety concerns, the unresolved problem of radioactive waste, and the link to the bomb – that come in the way of any significant expansion of nuclear power.

    Global warming is a serious issue. Providing ill-thought out answers is no way to address such a grave problem.

    Originally published by The Friday Times.

  • Nuclear Power is the Problem, Not a Solution

    There is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.

    At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

    The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry’s liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $ US9.1billion – 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactor s is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs – plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years – are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.

    It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different.

    In the US, where much of the world’s uranium is enriched, including Australia’s, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.

    Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

    In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages – the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste. .

    Contrary to the nuclear industry’s propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential. This is not so.

    These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.

    Tritium, another biologically significant gas, which is also routinely emitted from nuclear reactors is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen composed of two neutrons and one proton with an atomic weight of 3. The chemical symbol for tritium is H3. When one or both of the hydrogen atoms in water is displaced by tritium the water molecule is then called tritiated water. Tritium is a soft energy beta emitter, more mutagenic than gamma radiation, that incorporates directly into the DNA molecule of the gene. Its half life is 12.3 years, giving it a biologically active life of 246 years. It passes readily through the skin, lungs and digestive system and is distributed throughout the body.

    The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.

    Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.

    But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America’s high-level waste. But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.

    To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation — significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.

    This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases.

    The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the malignant effects of radiation than other people.

    I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear power plants.

    Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric literature.

    Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and leukemia.

    Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.

    Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.

    Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons — only 5kg is necessary to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year. Therefore any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically manufacture 40 bombs a year.

    Nuclear power therefore leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations, because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the danger of nuclear energy.

    Originally published by the Australian.

  • Nuclear Plants are Still Vulnerable, Panel Says

    Three and a half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government has failed to address the risk that a passenger plane flying at high speed could be deliberately crashed into a commercial nuclear plant, setting off fires and dispersing large amounts of radiation, a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded.

    Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have maintained that such an attack is improbable and that detailed analyses of the consequences of such attacks are unnecessary. Experts at the nation’s premier scientific body said those judgments are flawed.

    “There are currently no requirements in place to defend against the kinds of larger-scale, pre-meditated, skillful attacks that were carried out on September 11, 2001,” a panel of scientists said, even as it agreed such an attack would be difficult to pull off.

    Academy officials battled the government for months to make their declassified conclusions public — and the version released yesterday charged that federal secrecy edicts designed to keep information from terrorists were paradoxically hurting efforts to defend against such attacks.

    Restrictions on sharing information imposed by the NRC had kept the industry from addressing vulnerabilities, the report said.

    As a result, government labs and independent researchers have sometimes worked at cross-purposes, searched for solutions that others had already found and duplicated complex analyses.

    NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the agency “respectfully disagrees” that there are no provisions to deal with major attacks.

    Security measures have been upgraded since 2001, and the agency continues to analyze risks, he said. But he emphasized that such attacks are improbable and that other agencies are guarding against them.

    “We do believe that the possibility of a successful attack using commercial aircraft is very small,” he said. It is impractical to ask commercial plants to defend against such attacks, Burnell concluded. But he said plants are aware of the risk and are implementing measures to deal with worst-case scenarios.

    As to the complaint of excessive secrecy, Burnell said the commission has to implement the law, which requires controls on information that could be misused. The debate is not over classified information but rather over sensitive data that ought not to be publicized.

    In an earlier interview, E. William Colglazier, executive officer of the academy, said the nuclear agency’s guidelines for this classification are vague. Even when officials agreed that certain details in the report are not secret, he said, they had argued that chunks of non-secret information, when presented together, constituted “Safeguards Information.”

    The report said government scientists and independent researchers had conducted analyses of threats without knowing that others were doing the same.

    Burnell acknowledged that “the system was not perfect” but said that as more people receive security clearances such bottlenecks could be reduced. The commission has indicated it is seeking to increase access to information.

    To the relief of the industry, the academy report disputed a characterization that the commission used in a letter to Congress on March 14. The letter implied that the academy was recommending moving spent nuclear fuel from large pools to dry storage casks. Industry believes that the pools are as safe as the casks and that moving the fuel is not worth the expense.

    Louis J. Lanzerotti, chairman of the academy’s report, said that his panel had called for analyses of large attacks and that those results might prompt the commission to move fuel to dry storage at some plants.

    Although dry storage has advantages, the risk of major attacks could be sufficiently addressed by changing how spent fuel is stored in pools and by installing water sprays to control fires, said the academy’s Kevin Crowley, the study coordinator.

    Originally published by The Washington Post

  • An Orwellian View of Nuclear Energy: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Nuclear Energy is Green

    In George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, the government uses the slogans war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Now, Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, April 9, 2005) would have us believe that nuclear energy is green.

    Kristof’s argument that “nukes are green” is out of touch with reality. Kristof would have us believe that the truly green energy sources – solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal – are no match compared to the benefits of nuclear power. He argues that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. Presumably, in Kristof’s logic, the gigantic steam towers, reactor buildings and nuclear fuel spring from the earth as naturally as the sun shines and the wind blows.

    Kristof offers an extremely narrow examination of the issue. He fails to consider that the construction of a nuclear plant, as well as fueling, decommissioning and storage of spent fuel, relies heavily upon fossil fuels, which generate vast quantities of greenhouse gases. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Energy Information Administration says the global strategy to mitigate carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions, besides conservation programs, should include retiring coal-fired plants in favor of natural gas and renewables and not to construct new nuclear plants.

    Kristof also fails to accurately analyze the economics of the nuclear industry. Monstrous government subsidies have kept the industry afloat. Without massive subsidization, the nuclear industry’s insurance liabilities would have driven the industry into the ground years ago. The IAEA Energy Information Administration reports that “new nuclear power plants presently cost more to build than do fossil fuel plants. This includes fossil fuel plants such as those fired by natural gas, a fuel that carries lower environmental costs…”

    Combined costs of new nuclear plants with the unknown yet enormous costs to store the more than 45,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste produced to date, promises to handicap future generations with a gargantuan debt. If nuclear energy is accepted as green and reactors multiply across the world, future generations can expect not only an economic nightmare, but also the potential for accidents such as Chernobyl, calamitous terrorist attacks and an environment strewn with radioactivity.

    Kristof is dead wrong in suggesting that burdening future generations with nuclear wastes buried underground is more reasonable than burdening them with a warmer world in which Manhattan is submerged under 20 feet of water. Endorsing nuclear energy as green and calling for an expanded national presence for nuclear energy will not solve the global warming crisis, it will only exacerbate it. Accepting nuclear energy as green will increase the number of targets terrorists might strike; increase the amount of viciously radioactive waste in need of heavily protected long-term storage; and increase the amount of ozone depleting gases emitted into the atmosphere.

    Replacing fossil fuels with truly renewable energy sources could be accomplished with government subsidization for a fraction of what the US is currently spending to subsidize the nuclear power industry and to secure our access to Middle East oil through military intervention and foreign aid.

    Unless war is peace and freedom is slavery, then nuclear energy is not green. Policy makers must realize they need not choose between two poisons: burdening future generations with nuclear wastes buried underground or burdening the future with a warmer world submerged under water. Kristof glosses over the true viability of clean, renewable energy sources. With sufficient funding, research, and legislative support, future generations won’t have to face the bleak Orwellian future that Kristof implies is inevitable.

    Luke Brothers is the Communications and Outreach Associate at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Oyster Creek Plant Couldn’t Withstand Hit from Terrorist Aircraft

    Our political leaders need to resolve a serious predicament. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation allows power plants like the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey to operate in a post-9/11 environment, although the plant’s reactor building is structurally inadequate to protect used nuclear fuel rods from a terrorist attack.

    Oyster Creek is neither structurally robust nor designed to resist an aircraft impact. This concern may also be present in 22 nuclear sites, some with more than one reactor building.

    The Nuclear Security Coalition, a consortium of independent nuclear watchdog groups, petitioned the NRC earlier this month to address structural vulnerabilities at plants with building designs similar to Oyster Creek’s. The magnitude of this issue and its implications for national security require congressional oversight; it should not be left only to the NRC review process.

    To the best of my knowledge, the current design-basis-threat orders issued by the NRC do not include a requirement to protect against an aircraft attack. In addition, the most recent evacuation plan for Oyster Creek does not consider an evacuation based on a suicide aircraft attack that can result in a Chernobyl-type event.

    The evacuation plan assumes an orderly egress from towns around the power plant, ignoring any road congestion resulting from panic outside the 10-mile plant radius. At last month’s public hearing on Oyster Creek’s evacuation plan, which estimated it would take seven to 10 hours to evacuate a 10-mile radius around the plant, someone asked how slow the response would have to be in order for the pl an to be deemed unacceptable. The panel’s response: There is no time limit. This is unacceptable.

    The impact of a large aircraft into the reactor building’s concrete floor near the spent fuel pool would cause catastrophic building failure. It would allow burning fuel to leak onto the floors below, damaging vital wiring and equipment needed to shut down the reactor. An aircraft impact would severely damage the spent fuel pool, causing a water leak that would uncover tons of radioactive fuel r ods. The result of a terrorist attack on Oyster Creek’s reactor building would exceed a Chernobyl meltdown event because there is more fuel in Oyster Creek’s fuel pool than there was in Chernobyl’s reactor.

    The impact from only one 1,000-pound object traveling at 300 mph and hitting the floor at an angle of 30 degrees above horizontal exceeds the strongest floor beam capacity by more than 500 percent. Impact on the weakest floor beam exceeds the beam’s capacity by 8,000 percent. The order of magnitude of these values clearly demonstrates Oyster Creek’s reactor building is an unacceptable safety risk.

    There are other important reasons the Oyster Creek plant should be shut down:

    “The federal government is not yet prepared to identify and prevent every terrorist plot, and the level of expertise required to stop terrorism may not occur for many years. Exelon, the owner of Oyster Creek, stated in public information newsletters that it relies on our president, the Armed Forces, the FBI and intelligence agencies to protect the plant from attack outside the fence of the plant . That isn’t good enough.

    “As described in the 9/11 Commission report, al-Qaida terrorists are meticulous in their planning and they are patient. The longer Oyster Creek is allowed to operate, the longer it is a target of opportunity.

    To succeed, they need only one aircraft, flying from an overseas airport, to disappear from FAA radar screens 15 minutes before impacting Oyster Creek’s reactor building. Timelines supplied by the 9/11 Commission report show our military fighters cannot take off, intercept and shoot down a plane within 15 minutes after terrorist actions are recognized by FAA personnel.

    “If Oyster Creek were shut down today, all fuel in the reactor vessel must be transferred to the spent fuel pool to “cool” a minimum of five years before it can be removed from the reactor building. Before any used radioactive fuel can be taken out of the reactor building’s fuel pool, Exelon must order, build and install additional dry storage vaults to store the material somewhere on site.

    “The longer Oyster Creek operates without an exact closing date, the more the work culture at the plant will degrade because of fear of losing a job. Exelon management will postpone equipment upgrades or choose “cheap fixes” if there is no assurance the company will recoup its investment for any plant repair or upgrade.

    I urge residents to support the immediate shutdown of Oyster Creek, to lobby town leaders to pass resolutions demanding the plant’s closure and to lobby congressional representatives to pass laws eliminating NRC regulations that place the interest of private companies over public safety.

    Stephen M. Lazorchak, Dover Township, is a consulting structural engineer and a former Oyster Creek employee.

    Originally published in the Asbury Park Press.

  • Nuclear Power Still a Deadly Proposition

    While Vice President Dick Cheney is actively promoting nuclear power as a significant plank in his energy plan, he claims that nuclear power is “a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source.”

    The Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industries, is currently running an energetic campaign for the revivification of nuclear power. Ubiquitous TV and radio ads carry the admonition that “Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of clean electricity. And they deserve clean air.”

    Also, a consortium of 10 U.S. utilities has requested funding from the federal government for the construction of new reactors based on a European design, and they hope to receive government approval by 2010. This is a major policy change since no new nuclear reactors have been ordered in the United States since 1974.

    Nevertheless, the claims of the Mr. Cheney and the nuclear industry are false. According to data from the U.S. Energy Department (DOE), the production of nuclear power significantly contributes both to global warming and ozone depletion.

    The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power uses 93 percent of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gas made annually in the United States . The global production of CFC is banned under the Montreal Protocol because it is a potent destroyer of ozone in the stratosphere, which protects us from the carcinogenic effects of solar ultraviolet light. The ozone layer is now so thin that the population in Australia is currently experiencing one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world.

    CFC compounds are also potent global warming agents 10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient heat trappers than carbon dioxide, which itself is responsible for 50 percent of the global warming phenomenon.

    But nuclear power also contributes significantly to global carbon dioxide production. Huge quantities of fossil fuel are expended for the “front end” of the nuclear fuel cycle — to mine, mill and enrich the uranium fuel and to construct the massive nuclear reactor buildings and their cooling towers.

    Uranium enrichment is a particularly energy intensive process which uses electricity generated from huge coal-fired plants. Estimates of carbon dioxide production related to nuclear power are available from DOE for the “front end” of the nuclear fuel cycle, but prospective estimates for the “back end” of the cycle have yet to be calculated.

    Tens of thousands of tons of intensely hot radioactive fuel rods must continuously be cooled for decades in large pools of circulating water and these rods must then be carefully transported by road and rail and isolated from the environment in remote storage facilities in the United States . The radioactive reactor building must also be decommissioned after 40 years of operation, taken apart by remote control and similarly transported long distances and stored. Fully 95 percent of U.S. high level waste — waste that is intensely radioactive — has been generated by nuclear power thus far.

    This nuclear waste must then be guarded, protected and isolated from the environment for tens of thousands of years — a physical and scientific impossibility. Biologically dangerous radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium will seep and leak into the water tables and become very concentrated in food chains for the rest of time, inevitably increasing the incidence of childhood cancer, genetic diseases and congenital malformations for this and future generations.

    Conclusion: Nuclear power is neither clean, green nor safe. It is the most biologically dangerous method to boil water to generate steam for the production of electricity.

    Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician, is president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and author of The New Nuclear Danger, George Bush’s Military Industrial Complex (The New Press). She lives near Sydney, Australia.

    Originally published by the Baltimore Sun.