Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  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 ce
nturies,” 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 t
o 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.