Nuclear power keeps taking head punches from the hard-hitting marketplace. On January 17, Japan’s Hitachi Corporation halted work on a $19.3 billion nuclear power project called Wylfa in North Wales. Hitachi also cancelled nuclear reactor plans in Oldbury in Gloucestershire, England and Toshiba scrubbed its reactor construction at Moorside in Cumbria, England. The British press noted that “renewable alternatives are increasingly being viewed as cheaper, less risky, and more economic,” while Greg Clark, England’s Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, told the New York Times, “The economics of the energy market have changed significantly…” with the price of renewables going down and that of nuclear power going up. According to reports, Clark considered offering taxpayer support to Hitachi for one-third of the project’s equity financing and all of its construction debt, but the company wanted more. Private investors were put off by the project’s 10-year wait for a dividend and the risks of cost overruns. Hitachi will reportedly take a $2.75 billion loss in cancelling the Wylfa reactor. The company purchased the construction site for $900 million, but spent about $2.6 billion on design permits, staff, and job training. —London Daily Telegraph, Jan. 24; New York Times, Jan. 18, 2019
Nuclear Reactor Phase-outs Spreading
The Nuclear Monitor reports that Belgium has reached an agreement on an Energy Pact which includes a nuclear phase-out. All political parties—with the exception of one small, far-right party—have agreed to the new strategy. Likewise, Spain has declared it will close the last of its nuclear reactors before 2030 and not build new units. Secretary for Energy José Dominguez said Nov. 15, 2018 that Spain does not plan to operate any of its reactors beyond their 40-year licenses. Accordingly, the country’s oldest reactor will be closed in 2021, and its newest will go offline in 2028. Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland are phasing out nuclear power. Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022. Italy has resolved to remain non-nuclear, and Switzerland has banned the construction of new reactors.
—EURACTIV.com, Nov 19, 2018; The Nuclear Monitor, issue: #860, No. 4718
Hoist on a Nuclear Petard? Army Wants “Battlefield” Nuclear Reactors
A soldier’s fear of being “hoist on your own petard” means being accidentally wounded or killed by the detonation of one’s own bomb. Now comes the US Army’s announcement of “Project Dilithium,” a scheme worthy of science fiction to make a small, portable nuclear reactor that can be hauled—alongside occupying military forces—to remote military outposts to provide electricity. The Army says such reactors could reduce the number of diesel tanker caravans transporting tons of fuel, could shorten military supply lines, and eliminate some easy targets (below). But putting a reactor in a warzone would be to exchange one easy target for another, one that would risk catastrophic health and environmental damage if the unit were to suffer containment failure. Even Popular Mechanics had the common sense to push back, noting that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that “… it would never be safe enough to deploy on the battlefield. The risk of meltdown and radiation release would be too great ever to justify deploying the reactor into the field, the scientists say.” The Bulletin slammed the proposal, warning: “An operating nuclear reactor is essentially a can filled with concentrated radioactive material, including some highly volatile radionuclides, under conditions of high pressure and temperature. Even a reactor as small as 1 megawatt-electric would contain a large quantity of highly radioactive, long-lived isotopes such as cesium-137—a potential dirty bomb far bigger than the medical radiation sources that have caused much concern among security experts.”
— Popular Mechanics, Feb. 25; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb. 22, 2019
Fukushima Continues to Plague Pacific Ocean Fishery
John LaForge
Spring 2019 Nukewatch Quarterly
The Japanese fishing community and watchdog groups have raised alarms over government plans to dump over one million tons of highly contaminated waste water from the three devastated Fukushima nuclear reactors into the Pacific Ocean.
The London Telegraph reported last October that Japan’s “plan to release the approximately 1.09 million tons of water currently stored in 900 tanks… has triggered a fierce backlash from local residents and environmental organizations, as well as groups in South Korea and Taiwan fearful that radioactivity from the second-worst nuclear disaster in history might wash up on their shores.”
Making matters worse, Greenpeace issued a report last January 22 slamming the dumping plan, reminding readers that Tokyo Electric Power Co. or TEPCO—owners of the destroyed reactors—admitted in 2018 that its water decontamination system had never worked. The Telegraph noted, “[T]he Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) has consistently failed to eliminate a cocktail of other radioactive elements, including iodine, ruthenium, rhodium, antimony, tellurium, cobalt and strontium.” Further, “In late September [2018], Tepco was forced to admit that around 80% of the water stored at the Fukushima site still contains radioactive substances above legal levels…” the Telegraph said.
The South China Morning Post reported, “Despite the much-vaunted ALPS plant… TEPCO has confirmed that levels of strontium-90 are more than 100 times above legally permitted levels in 65,000 tons of water that have already been through the ALPS system.” Some of the “treated” waste water still has strontium-90 concentrations 20,000 times the allowable limit.
Japan’s fishing community was outraged about the dumping threat during a series of public hearings last year that were designed to convince skeptical observers that pouring more radiation in the Pacific is a good idea. The magnitude-9 earthquake, and the tsunami it caused on March 11, 2011, left more than 27,500 people dead or missing in northeast Japan and triggered the largest oceanic radioactive contamination in history.
Fukushima’s contaminated water continues to flow into the Pacific at a rate of around 2 billion Becquerels a day, Japan Times reported on March 29, 2018.
Dumping Radioactive Water Poisons Fish
Since Fukushima’s meltdowns began in 2011, there has been regular news of seafood contamination. As recently as Feb. 2, the Japan Times reported that cesium-137 far above Japan’s legal limit was detected in fish caught off Fukushima. According to the local Fishery Cooperative Association, skate that were caught over 180 feet deep were found with 161 Becquerels-per-kilogram of radioactive cesium-137, exceeding the allowable limit of 100 Bq-per-kg.
Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish in the US and Canadian waters. The Haida Gwaii Observer in Queen Charlotte, British Columbia reported March 16, 2018 on a study by Simon Fraser University. Author Krysztof Starosta discovered that cesium-137 “levels found in both the salmon and soil samples remained below Canada’s safety guidelines, posing minimal health risk to B.C.’s salmon and human populations.” The use of the word “minimal” by Starosta is not a scientific term of art. “Minimal” means there is some risk, especially considering the cumulative effect of eating contaminated fish over many years.
“You can’t say there is absolutely zero risk because any radiation is assumed to carry at least some small risk,” said Delvan Neville of Oregon State University’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Radiation Health Physics. The Oregon Statesman Journal reported on Neville’s 2014 study which found that cesium-137 from Fukushima in albacore tuna caught off Oregon’s coast had tripled since the three meltdowns. In 2012, albacore and blue fin tuna caught off the west coast, were also found contaminated.
Until 2018, TEPCO repeatedly claimed, and news reporters often noted, that its “advanced [ALPS] processes had reduced the cancer-causing radioactive contaminants” such as strontium-90, iodine-129 and ruthenium-106 in the water “to non-detectible levels.”
Nuclear Power Worsens & Can’t Survive Climate Disruption
By John LaForge
Spring Quarterly 2019
Donald Trump claims, “America will never be a socialist country.” But he’s too late. We already have socialism for the rich, with the nuclear power industry as a prime example.
On a level playing field, nuclear power would go bust. Those owners get financial supports or subsidies that safe renewables like solar power, geothermal, and wind power don’t get. Two particularly large government handouts keep the reactor business afloat, and without them it would crash overnight.
1) In a free market, the US Price Anderson Act would be repealed. The act provides limited liability insurance to reactor operators in the event of a loss-of-coolant, or other radiation catastrophe. The nuclear industry would have to get insurance on the open market like all other industrial operations. This would break their bank, since major insurers would only sell such a policy at astronomical rates, if at all.
2) The US Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) would also be repealed. NWPA is the government’s pledge to take custody of and assume liability for the industry’s radioactive waste. Without NWPA the industry would have to pay to contain, isolate and manage its waste for the 1-million-year danger period. The long-term cost would zero the industry’s portfolio in a quick “correction.”
“From a business perspective, it’s over”
Even if the industry retained the above two subsidies, economists say the reactor business is finished. Jeremy Rifkin—the renowned economic and social theorist, political advisor to the European Union and heads-of-state, and author of 20 books—was asked his view of nuclear power’s future at a Wermuth Asset Management global investors’ conference. Rifkin demolished its prospects in short order:
Frankly, I think … it’s over. Let me explain why from a business perspective. Nuclear power was pretty well dead-in-the-water in the 1980s, after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It had a comeback. The come-back was the industry saying: ‘We are part of the solution for climate change because we don’t emit CO2. It’s polluting, but there’s no CO2.’
“Here’s the issue: Nuclear power right now is six percent of [the electric] energy of the world. There are only 400 nuclear power plants. These are old nuclear power plants. But our scientists tell us [that] to have a minimum impact on climate change—which is the whole rationale for bringing this technology back—nuclear would have to be 20 percent of the energy mix to have the minimum, minimum impact on climate change—not six percent of the mix.
“That means we’d have to replace the existing 400 nuclear plants and build 1,600 additional plants. Three nuclear plants have to be built every 30 days for 40 years to get to 20 percent, and by that time climate change will have run its course for us. So I think, from a business point of view, I just don’t see that investment. I’d be surprised if we replace 100 of the 400 existing nuclear plants which would take us down to 1 or 2 percent of the energy [mix].
“Number 2: We still don’t know how to recycle the nuclear waste and we’re 70 years in. We have good engineers in the United States. We spent 18 years and $8 billion building an underground vault in Yucca Mountain to store the waste for 10,000 years, but we can’t use it. It’s already no good because there are cracks in the mountain. But any geologist could have told them we live on tectonic plates and you can’t keep underground vaults secure.
“Number 3: We run into uranium deficits according to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] between 2025 and 2035 with just the existing 400 plants. So that means the price goes up.
“Number 4: We could do what the French generation of new plants is doing and recycle the uranium to plutonium. But then we have plutonium all over the world in an age of uncertainty and terrorism.
“Finally, and this is the big one that people don’t realize: We don’t have the water. Over 40 percent of all the fresh water consumed in France each year goes to cooling the nuclear reactors. It’s almost 50 percent now. When it comes back [when reactor cooling water is returned to the lakes and rivers] it’s heated and it’s dehydrating our ecosystems, and threatening our agriculture. We don’t have the water, and this is true all over the world. We have saltwater nuclear plants but then you have to put them on coastal regions and you risk a Fukushima because of tsunamis….
“So it’s no accident Siemens [Corporation] is out, Germany is out, Italy is out, Japan is now out… [and since Rifkin spoke, Spain and Belgium too are out.] I’d be surprised if nuclear has much of a life left. I don’t think it’s a good business deal.”
Rifkin is not alone in this assessment. William Von Hoene, Senior Vice President of Exelon Corp., said last April 16 at the annual US Energy Association’s meeting, “I don’t think we’re building any more nuclear plants in the United States,” Platts reported. “I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,” Von Hoene said. “I’m not arguing for the construction of new nuclear plants. They are too expensive to construct.”
—For a fact sheet on industry leaders who say nuclear power is over, see: http://nukewatchinfo. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Why-No-NuclearRevival-Full-Fact-Sheet.pdf.
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