Quarterly Newsletter

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Small Modular Reactors” Touted by Profiteers and Regulators

By Bill Christofferson

The struggling nuclear power industry’s dreams of becoming relevant again have gotten a lift from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has certified NuScale Power’s “small modular reactor,” the first such design cleared for use in the United States.

Two utilities serving Wisconsin customers, and perhaps a third, appear eager to jump on the small reactor bandwagon, which they tout as a solution to the climate crisis. Dairyland Power Cooperative in LaCrosse, and Xcel Energies, operating as Northern States Power in Wisconsin, have contracted with NuScale, an Oregon firm, to evaluate the potential of using the small-scale reactors. NuScale is not a disinterested party; it developed the modular reactors and wants to sell them, so it is safe to expect some positive recommendations.

Madison Gas and Electric may also be interested. CEO Jeffrey Keebler said last year at a Wisconsin Technology Council meeting that he hasn’t ruled out more nuclear, including maybe partnering with Dairyland Power. But, he added, it would have to be “right for our community,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported. It would be a hard sell in Madison.

The utilities hope that new technology and smaller reactors will overcome the problems plaguing the industry since its inception. It used to promise energy “too cheap to meter.” Now it promotes poison power as a solution to climate change. It never quits pitching claptrap. Although there has not been a new reactor in Wisconsin for 50 years, hope springs eternal.

Critics pan the prospective new reactors, none of which is yet operating. “Too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain. That, in a nutshell, describes NuScale’s planned small modular reactor (SMR) project, which has been in development since 2001 and will not begin commercial operations before 2029, if ever,” according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

“Regulatory” is the NRC’s middle name, but it and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are both unabashed cheerleaders and enablers for reactors. “We are thrilled to announce the historic rulemaking from the NRC for NuScale’s small modular reactor design, and we thank the Department of Energy for [its] support throughout this process,” said NuScale President and CEO John Hopkins, who added that the DOE “has been an invaluable partner.” And that’s from a DOE press release. The DOE has invested $300 million in taxpayer handouts to support the NuScale pipe dream.

The same reactor problems that have endangered the public for decades have not magically disappeared.

A carbon-free source of energy? As emeritus professor of sociology at UW-La Crosse Al Gedicks puts it: “Nuclear power is not carbon-free electricity. At each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining, milling, and enrichment, to construction, decommissioning and waste storage, nuclear power burns fossil fuel and contributes greenhouse gas emissions that accelerate global climate change. Compared to renewable energy, nuclear power releases four to five times the CO2 per unit of energy produced.”

Economics are the primary reason almost no new nuclear reactors have begun operating in the U.S. in decades, especially as renewable energy costs have plummeted. Reactor startups are notorious for astronomical cost overruns. NuScale has already upped the estimated energy cost for its first planned project in Idaho from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour — before any work has even begun. The first reactors would go into operation in 2029 at the earliest, but the odds are it will be years later, given past experience.

The reactors produce high-level radioactive waste, some of which is so deadly, and decays so slowly, it must be kept out of the environment for 1 million years. Not to worry, the industry says, a permanent solution will be found, although they have been producing the waste for 65 years now with no answer in sight. In Wisconsin, the waste is accumulating next to Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River in casks that may last 100 years — if all goes well.

—Bill Christofferson is a former journalist and political consultant who worked in state and local government, now retired. He is a founder of Nukewatch and was the first director, from 1980-1983.

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Leaks at Minnesota Reactor

By North American Water Office

Photo Credit: Mar 17, 2023 Valley News KVLY

Events having the potential to affect public health and safety are occurring at Xcel Energy’s Monticello single nuclear power reactor, about 35 miles up the Mississippi River from Minneapolis. Primary cooling water containing tritium (radioactive hydrogen) has been leaking into the ground at least since last November.

Xcel Energy and the Minnesota Department of Health didn’t bother to report the Monticello leak of about 400,000 gallons until mid-March, and then announced, with much fanfare, that there is no risk to public health and safety and that the leak had not reached the Mississippi River. Then, a few days later Xcel Energy announced a second leak of several hundred gallons because the tank into which contaminated water had been collected overflowed. Not bad, for a clown show.

While state and corporate officials say not to worry, the problem is that these same people fail to consider the authority of the National Academy of Sciences in its 2006 report BEIR VII — the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The book-length BEIR VII conclusively reported that there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation, no level of exposure that can be declared harmless. Every exposure, no matter how small, carries a potential for causing cancers and other mutations.

Considering that the radioactive half-life of tritium is just over 12 years, and that it takes about 10 half-lives before a radioactive substance becomes relatively benign biologically, it is probably premature to speculate about public health and safety impacts. In fact, there are three pathways for leaked radiation to affect the public: it can migrate to the river, which supplies most of the drinking water for Minneapolis; it can migrate into groundwater off-site, where it becomes available for private and municipal water pumps; and it can evaporate. There is no doubt that during the next 120 years, some fraction of the leakage will follow each of these pathways and then affect biological activity. Of course, nobody will ever know how much contamination went where, or know what it did when it got there, because radiation monitoring at Monticello, as well as at the rest of the global commercial nuclear fleet, is mostly incapable of detecting radiation in any of these pathways. It makes better PR to just say there is no threat to public health and safety.

This Monticello pipe leak could be an omen of things to come. The leak occurred because a pipe carrying primary cooling water broke. Primary cooling water circulates through the reactor and thereby becomes radioactive. This radioactivity bombards the pipe through which it flowed with neutrons, and over time, this neutron bombardment causes metals to get brittle. Arguably, the pipe broke because it had become embrittled and something jarred it. The problem here – as with all nuclear reactors — is that every bit of metal at Monticello that is part of the primary system, which contains and controls the nuclear reaction, has also been subjected to this same neutron bombardment. All these metals are at some elevated state of embrittlement, now that the reactor is over 50 years old. As a result, we all now get to sit around and wait to see which components will be next in line to brake, and what the consequences of that breakage will be. That could get real exciting very quickly.

— Additional news on Minnesota reactor troubles can be found at Water for Life, the newsletter of the North American Water Office (nawo.org)

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Adding Uranium Weapons to Long List of Ukraine War Systems

By John LaForge

The Biden administration is expected to supply Ukraine with highly controversial depleted-uranium shells which are to be fired from the Abrams battle tanks the U.S. is sending to Kyiv, the Wall St. Journal reported June 13.

Any delivery of U.S. depleted uranium (DU) weapons to Ukraine would be in addition to the State Department’s Dec. 22, 2022 approval of the sale to Poland of as many as 112,000 heavy 120-millimeter DU shells which was announced by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The large120mm DU anti-tank shells are so heavy that the uranium in 112,000 munitions could weigh as much as 36 tons.

The British Ministry of Defense announced last March 20 that it too would send depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine along with its Challenger battle tanks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded then alleging that sending DU into Ukraine would mean the U.K. was “ready to violate international humanitarian law as in 1999 in Yugoslavia.” The reference is to the United Nations Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights which in 2002 labeled the use of DU “inhumane” and a violation of treaties that expressly forbid any use of “poison or poisoned weapons.”

The Wall St. Journal’s understated June 13 sub-headline warned: “The armor-piercing ammunition has raised concerns over health and environmental effects.” Indeed, between 1997 and 2004, USA Today, the Associated Press, New York Daily News, Life magazine, CNN, and others all reported that studies were finding an significantly increased rate of birth abnormalities among children of U.S. Gulf War veterans and among Iraqi children born after 1991.

The Wall St. Journal acknowledged that “The United Nations Environment Program said in a report last year that the [depleted uranium] metal’s ‘chemical toxicity’ presents the greatest potential danger, and ‘it can cause skin irritation, kidney failure, and increase the risks of cancer.’”

However, the paper “balanced” this U.N. warning by quoting John Kirby, a National Security Council coordinator, who reportedly dared to say last March that “studies indicate it isn’t a radioactive threat.”

In fact, the most damning reports about the harmful health and environmental effects of exposure to DU contamination come from the U.S. military itself. (See below.)

If the shells are used in the Ukraine war, the soil and water of the territory being contested will likely be contaminated with uranium and the other radioactive materials that are in the armor-piercing shells.

In 2003, experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 tonnes of DU were used by U.S.-led forces during their attack on Iraq in March and April that year.

That same year, the British Royal Society, declared that hundreds of tons of DU used by Britain and the U.S. against Iraq should be removed to protect the civilian population, contradicting Pentagon claims it was not necessary.

After NATO’s use of DU weapons in Kosovo in 1999, the Council of Europe called for a world-wide ban on the production, testing, use, and sale of DU weapons, asserting that DU pollution would have “long term effects on health and quality of life in South-East Europe, affecting future generations.” The call went unheeded.

A U.S. soldier holds a 120-mm depleted uranium anti-tank round which disperses poison heavy metal dust when it burns through hard targets. Photo by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Background

Depleted uranium is uranium hexafluoride or uranium-238, a waste material left from reactor fuel and nuclear warhead production. It is radioactive and a toxic heavy metal, and there are between 560,000 and 700,000 metric tons of this waste stored in the United States. On March 25, 1997 the New York Times reported the volume as 1.25 billion pounds. The military calls the DU munitions “armor piercing cartridges” avoiding the taint of the word “uranium.”

As Nukewatch reported in the 2000s, when DU smashes through tank armor, it becomes an aerosol of dust or gas-like particles that can be inhaled and carried long distances on the wind, contaminating soil and water.

In 1991, between 300 and 800 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait by U.S. forces. The Pentagon says the U.S. military fired about 10,800 DU rounds — about three tons — into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995. Over 31,000 DU rounds — about ten tons — were shot into Kosovo in 1999 according to NATO. In Iraq, in the number of birth abnormalities skyrocketed following the massive use of DU in the Persian Gulf War.

The U.S. Department of Energy admitted in January 2000 that the metal in DU shells is often contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, and americium, long-lived, highly radioactive isotopes, much more hazardous than DU, or uranium-238.

While the U.S. military repeatedly declares that its uranium weapons contain only uranium-238, and that its DU shells “are less radioactive than natural uranium,” the United Nations Environment Program and others proved that uranium shells used by the U.S. and the U.K. were spiked with fission products including plutonium.

In Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (International Physicians Press, 1992), the authors say “A safe conclusion is that plutonium is probably the most carcinogenic substance known.

Government evidence of harm

* The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General’s 1993 manual “Depleted Uranium Safety Training” says the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer (lung and bone) and kidney damage. It recommends that the Army “… convene a working group … to identify countermeasures against DU exposure.”

* The U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute found in 2002 that DU produces one-million times as much chromosome damage as would be predicted from its radioactivity alone, and that it causes a form of long-term “delayed reproductive death” of cells. The institute then canceled the funding of this research.

* In 1979, the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command warned, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity (emergency and fire-fighting personnel) but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to airborne uranium dust.”

* In 1995, the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute reported, “The radiation dose to critical organs depends upon the amount of time that depleted uranium resides in the organs. When this value is known or estimated, cancer and hereditary risk estimates can be determined.” Depleted uranium has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body, the AEPI found.

* In 1997, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute reportedly found that, “In animal studies, embedded DU, unlike most metals, dissolves and spreads throughout the body depositing in organs like the spleen and the brain, and a pregnant female rat will pass DU along to a developing fetus.”

* In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that depleted uranium is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” The report said that “long term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in cancer … there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

– Beyond Nuclear, April 16; Common Dreams Mar 21; Chris Bugsby “Uranium weapons being employed in Ukraine have significantly increased Uranium levels in the air in the UK,” March 2023; ICBUW Jul 3, 2022

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Earth Day ‘23: A Newly Post-Nuclear Germany vs. California’s Reactor Relapse

Germany’s initiative calls out California’s backpedaling

By Harvey Wasserman

Reuters reported on December 16, 2022 that renewable sources like these wind turbines now produce over 46% of Germany’s electricity.

This year’s Earth Day marked a massive green energy triumph in Germany that stands in stark contrast to a bitter nuclear challenge in California.

A wide range of estimates puts the two regions at a virtual tie for the world’s fourth and fifth-largest economies.

They also share a leading growth industry — renewable energy — with unprecedented investments in wind, solar, batteries, and efficiency. But when it comes to atomic power, they are headed in very different directions.

On April 15, 2023 Germany claimed a huge global landmark by becoming one of the world’s wealthiest nations to pull the plug on atomic power.

The decision dates back to 2011, when Germany’s powerful Green movement led a national demonstration aiming to shut the seventeen atomic reactors that, at the time, provided around a quarter of the nation’s electricity.

Before the rally took place, four reactor buildings blew up in Fukushima, Japan, sending huge clouds of radioactive fallout into the air and ocean.

Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel — who has a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry — ordered eight reactors immediately shut, and soon announced a plan to shut the remaining nine by December 31, 2022.

This “energiewende,” or “energy transition,” substitutes wind, solar, battery storage, and increased efficiency for nuclear reactors, moving Germany toward full reliance on renewables. Germany, since then, has invested billions in the renewables sector, transitioning whole towns to locally owned, rooftop solar power and corporate wind power pumped in from large turbines in the North Sea.

The shutdown of Germany’s last three reactors was delayed by nearly four months due to natural gas shortages caused by the Russian war in Ukraine.

It was also complicated by a major atomic breakdown in neighboring France. Heavily reliant on nuclear power, France’s more than fifty standard-design reactors succumbed to a wide range of problems, including generic structural flaws and warming rivers too hot to cool their super-heated radioactive cores. In 2022, with more than half its fleet of reactors under repair, France made up for the energy shortfall by importing power from Germany, much of it generated by the burning of coal.

This prompted the nuclear industry to criticize Germany’s plan by pointing to a rise in the country’s CO2 emissions from burning increased quantities of coal, failing to note that much of that power was being exported to France to compensate for its own shuttered reactors.

California, whose economy may now be slightly larger than Germany’s, has taken an opposite route.

Two of its last four reactors — at San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego — were shuttered in 2012, and closed permanently in 2013, after flaws were found in the turbines and other components.

In 2016, a deal was reached to shut the Golden State’s last two reactors, located at Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of protestors were arrested at Diablo Canyon, more than at any other American nuclear reactor.

The 2016 shutdown deal involved another energiewende, based on blueprints to replace Diablo’s power with a huge influx of new wind, solar, battery, and efficiency installations. The agreement was approved by the California state legislature, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the state Public Utilities Commission. It was signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown, then-Lieutenant-Governor Gavin Newsom, and a wide range of local governments, unions, and environmental groups, all of whom assumed the state would thus be nuke-free once Unit Two was shut in 2025 — the date its original forty-year license would expire.

But along the way, the state experienced two close calls with partial blackouts. During both incidents, Newsom, now the governor, asked consumers to dial back their energy use. Ironically, independent battery capacity — mostly controlled by individual owners — helped the state stay lit.

But Newsom reversed course and now argues that California must keep Diablo open. Infuriating the national safe energy movement, Newsom rammed through the legislature a $1.4 billion midnight bailout for PG&E, to be funded by all of the state’s consumers, including many who live hundreds of miles from the reactors, and receive no energy from it at all.

The Biden Administration also kicked in $1.1 billion, money that safe energy advocates angrily argue would be far better spent on renewables.

In 2019, a statewide petition signed by Hollywood’s Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, Lily Tomlin, Eric Roberts, and some 2,500 other Californians demanded that Newsom facilitate an independent inspection. Nearing forty years of age, both Diablo reactors suffer a wide range of structural and age-related defects.

They are also surrounded by at least a dozen known earthquake faults, sitting just forty-five miles from the infamous San Andreas fault. Former NRC site inspector Michael Peck, who was stationed at Diablo for five years, has warned it might not survive a major earthquake, for which its owner, PG&E, has little or no private insurance. The state has never made public any plans to evacuate Los Angeles or other heavily populated areas in the event of an accident.

Newsom has also supported moves by state regulators to severely slash compensation paid by utilities to solar panel owners who feed their excess energy into the grid. While 1,500 workers are stationed at Diablo, some 70,000 work in the state’s solar industry, which angrily charges that Newsom’s pro-nuclear, anti-green positions are crippling the state’s top job creator.

Indeed, the irony of these twin economies heading in opposite energy directions is hard to ignore. In the 1970s, much of America’s early anti-nuclear movement was inspired by mass demonstrations led by German Greens (with the slogan “Atomkraft? Nein, danke!”). Both movements succeeded in massively moving their communities toward a renewable future.

But at this critical moment, Germany appears to be moving beyond nuclear power, while California clings to a hugely controversial technology it had once planned to transcend.

— Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman, the author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Energy and other books, is a senior editor and columnist for FreePress.org

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By Bill Christofferson

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