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November 8, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Case for Nuclear Power Fails Fact-Vs-Fiction Test

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: The Banana Comparison 

The nuclear industry often compares the radioactive wastes produced inside reactors with naturally-occurring radioactive elements like potassium-40 which is found in bananas. This disinformation is deliberately used to give the impression that consuming radiation is normal. “But this is a false comparison, since most naturally occurring long-lived radioactive elements, commonly found in Earth’s crust, are very weakly radioactive,” explains Dr. Steven Starr, the Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. “Note that potassium-40 has a specific activity [radioactive strength] of 71 ten-millionths of a curie per gram. Compare that to 88 curies per gram for cesium-137, and 140 curies per gram for strontium-90 [both created inside nuclear reactors]. In other words, cesium-137 is 12 million times more radioactive than potassium-40…. Strontium-90 releases almost 20 million times more radiation per unit mass than potassium-40. Which one of these would you rather have in your bananas?” — Steven Starr, “The Contamination of Japan with Radioactive Cesium,” in Crisis Without End, edited by Helen Caldicott, The New Press 2014, p. 46.

With five works of fiction under her belt, novelist Gwyneth Cravens makes a case for nuclear power as a way to fight climate change in “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy” (2007). The old fiction that nuclear power is safe and cool is presented her online PowerPoint lecture where Cravens lists items that convinced her to quit anti-nuclear work. The list is either an industry PR gimmick or just bad math, or both, but Cravens’ powerless points are easily rebutted.

Cravens: “Huge reserves of uranium, in geopolitically favorable places.”

This claim gives the impression of low price and easy access to uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that the world faces uranium deficits between 2025 and 2035. This means the price goes up. The “politically favorable” spots for uranium mining are all overseas (ending hope of energy independence). Kazakhstan mines the most uranium — 24 times the US volume; Canada, 14 times the US; Australia, six times the US. Even with the Trump cabinet’s de-regulation- and pollution-happy agenda, the US must clean up from past uranium mining. There are now 15,000 abandoned uranium mines and mills in the American Southwest, mostly located on Indian Land. Uranium mine and mill tailings have been left in the open air of the desert — 190 million metric tons of them — so wind and rain spread the contamination.

Cravens: “Fuel can be recycled many times. Only 2% used on one trip through a reactor.”

If this were factual, if “recycling” waste reactor fuel was being done for a profit anywhere, the industry would be gobbling up the money at factories everywhere. Formally known as reprocessing (the PR dept. dubbed it “recycling”), was abandoned in the United States after decades of expensive, dangerous attempts. The process produces huge quantities of highly radioactive liquid wastes that can’t be contained, the sort that is leaking from hundreds of tanks at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina. “Recycling” is being done by France, but only because a legal loophole allows the factory to pour one million liters (264,000 gallons) of liquid radioactive waste per day into the Irish Sea from its reprocessing. Studies by Dr. Chris Busby in England show that the dumped radioactive materials accumulating on local beaches have caused cancer in Irish children.

Cravens: “Mature technology with recent advances: inherently safe; large-scale hydrogen production; able to burn up nuclear waste.”

Nuclear power is mature alright. Most of the 447 reactors in the world are around 40 years old and near the end of their operational life. They provide about 6% of the world’s electricity. But scientists say that to have a minimum impact on climate change — and this is the whole point of Craven’s tour — nuclear would have to be 20% of the energy mix. This means that after today’s units are replaced, an additional 1,600 reactors need to be built — to get to 20%, not 6%. But this requires that three new reactors be built every 30 days for 40 years — and by that time climate change will have done its damage to us. “Inherently safe” reactors are unknown and untested except on drawing boards. Not one has been built. The dream of “burning up nuclear waste” hasn’t been demonstrated anywhere. Besides, the burning of waste adds heat, soot and ash to global warming.

Cravens: “US reactors operate at over 95% capacity.”

This is a verbal magic trick, helping distract the audience. What the word “capacity” distracts from is that nuclear reactors are about 33 percent “efficient,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This means that “for every three units of thermal energy generated by the reactor core, one unit of electrical energy goes out to the grid and two units of waste heat go into the environment.” The gargantuan use of water by nuclear reactors is a problem that most people don’t realize. Dr. Jeremy Rifkin, the renowned economist, notes that 40% of all the fresh water consumed in France each year goes to cooling its nuclear reactors. “When it comes back it’s heated and it’s dehydrating and threatening our agriculture and ecosystems. We don’t have the water, and this is true all over the world,” Rifkin said in 2013.

The US Energy Information Administration says, “Most power plants do not operate a full capacity every hour of every day of the year.” Reactors are routinely shut down for re-fueling, for replacement of worn-out parts, and for “unusual events” and accidents.

Cravens: “Over 12,000 reactor-years passed in safety.”

The risk of catastrophic reactor disasters is permanent and makes us permanently unsafe. Dismantling and shipping the Three Mile Island reactor, destroyed in 1979, took over 25 years. The Chernobyl reactor has been in cover-up mode for 30 years, contaminating land, water, and air ever since 1986. Whenever wildfires ravage the “exclusion zone,” they re-suspend radioactive fallout spreading it again and again. Fukushima, Japan’s three destroyed reactors will continue to poison the Pacific Ocean ever day until groundwater stops moving; the owners will be at least 40 years in the “clean-up” mode.

Even without such reactor catastrophes, federal agencies in the United States all warn that there is “no safe exposure to radiation.” Every dose, no matter how small, carries a risk of causing illness or cancer, and the risks are far higher for women girls and infants than for men. Since nuclear reactors can’t operate without continuously venting and pouring radioactively contaminated liquids and gases (from the core, from cooling water circulation systems, and from the waste fuel cooling pools) into the environment, the government has set “allowable” limits to this radioactive pollution of the water and air. The industry calls these limits “safe” but in fact they are all dangerous and merely “allowable.” This venting and pouring of radioactive gases and liquids from operating reactors has caused the spike in childhood leukemias and infant mortality in communities downwind from operating reactors, as  documented in studies in Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United States. The German studies were so convincing that the country decided to close all its 17 reactors by 2022.

Cravens: “Nuclear plant has small environmental footprint — less than a square mile.”

This claim ignores the mining, milling, processing, and fuel fabrication of uranium; the production of vast amounts of concrete and steel for reactors; and the vast quantities of cold water returned hot to oceans, lakes and rivers. It neglects to mention the acreage needed to transport, isolate, and manage 70,000 to 140,000 tons of highly radioactive waste fuel for up to one-million years, and the thousands of square miles of ordinary landfill space taken up by low- and intermediate level radioactive wastes.

Cravens: “Nuclear plant radiation emissions per year: less than you get from eating one banana.”

The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin debunked this absurdity in 2013 in a review of the pro-nuclear propaganda film “Pandora’s Promise.” Revkin wrote that the film “includes an interview in which the novelist Gwyneth Cravens claims that drinking one day’s tritium leakage from the Vermont Yankee plant in 2010 would have deposited no more radiation inside someone than eating one banana. Actually, it would have delivered about 150,000 times that much, calculates Ed Lyman.” A physicist, Dr. Lyman is the senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of “Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster” (The New Press, 2014).

Cravens’ one banana’s worth of “emissions per year” overlooks the 400-500 pounds of plutonium created annually in the reactor core. This material and other fission products emit heat and radiation for 240,000 years, and must be isolated from the environment for at least that long. Craven’s  banana emission hooey  also neglects the millions of tons of reactor-heated cooling water that is dumped back into rivers, lakes and oceans after being used to cool the reactor cores and tons of waste fuel in cooling pools.

Cravens: “Lowest environmental impact of any large-scale energy resource.”

This zinger rivals the nuclear industry’s most bogus of fraudulent slogans: “Energy too cheap to meter.”

Anyone who’s spent even a month looking at US electric power usage knows that conservation and efficiency have the lowest environmental impact of any large-scale producer. Dubbed “NegaWatts” by the Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, conserving electricity can eliminate over 1/3 of current US usage.

The IAEA reported in 2014, that “avoided energy” or NegaWatts — the difference between the amount actually used each year and the amount that would have been used had there been no conservation since 1974 — is now equivalent to two-thirds of annual consumption. That is almost as much as the world’s output of oil, gas and coal combined, The Economist reported.

Nuclear reactors only provide about 19% of the electricity used in the US, so conservation and efficiency could replace them without cost (beyond public education), without pollution, and without much delay. — John LaForge

Filed Under: Environment, Nuclear Power, Radiation Exposure, Weekly Column Tagged With: bananas, nuclear power, potassium-40, radiation

June 25, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Swiss Vote: Nuclear Out, Renewables In

Summer Quarterly 2017

On May 21, over 58% of voters in a Swiss refer­endum chose renewable energy over new nuclear power production. The vote paves the way for the country to move ahead with its clean power plan—focused on solar, wind, and hydro electricity—start­ing in January 2018. Regula Rytz, president of Switzerland’s Green party, called the May vote a “moment of historic change,” and “absolutely mag­nificent.” The Swiss government first proposed the phase-out of nuclear in favor of renewable energy sources in 2011, following Fukushima’s three-reactor disaster in Japan. Earlier in May, the Swiss government also drafted a law that would increase provisions for protecting the population in the event of a reactor accident.

—BBC, May 21; The Local (Switzerland), June 2, 2017

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy Tagged With: nuclear power, renewable energy

June 25, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Socialized Risk, Privatized Benefits, Keep Bum Reactors Afloat

By Kelly Lundeen

Summer Quarterly 2017

Once again corporations get favors when they fail. Westinghouse Inc., maker of the untested AP1000 reactor design, declared bankruptcy March 29, choosing to restructure due to “certain financial and construction challenges.” Its reactors under construc­tion in Georgia and in South Carolina were supposed to be producing electricity by now. Instead they’re running $12 billion over budget and three years behind schedule. Thanks to $4.5 billion in ratepayer financing in South Carolina, $3.9 billion in Geor­gia, and an $8.3 billion fed­eral loan guarantee authorized by the Department of Energy, the financial picture for West­inghouse, its parent company Toshiba and the state utili­ties Southern Company and Scana Energy, isn’t as bad as it should be.

Nuclear industry lobbyists and their campaign donations guarantee close ties between the government and the nuclear industry which has always relied on tax­payer subsidies. Despite being hugely unprofitable, it survives. Last August, taxpayers in New York were roped into paying a $7.6 billion to bailout that will benefit Exelon, Entergy and the French firm Elec­tricité de France. Illinois taxpayers are on the hook for a $2.34 billion bailout of Exelon. FirstEnergy is looking to rake in an additional $1.2 billion from the taxpayers of Ohio, even after vocal opposition dur­ing legislative testimony in May prompted delibera­tions to be suspended. Similar legislation to support reactor bailouts is in the works in Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

The nuclear industry cannot survive indefinitely. France’s nuclear giant Areva has reported financial losses in the billions which, along with the rest of France’s nuclear industry, could cost French tax­payers over $10 billion. Toshiba, has announced that it will not be building any more reactors; its nuclear sector has reported a loss of $6 billion, and that could go up to $10 billion. The near future of nuclear power would appear gloomy if it weren’t for its true saviors, the taxpayers, who will never have the clout of a nuclear lobbyist.

The $8.3 billion federal loan autho­rized for Georgia by the DOE has barely been mentioned in main­stream media, while the “inexcus­able” 2011 loan guarantee given to the solar power company Solyndra, which later failed, was covered ex­tensively and called “scandalous” by the Washington Post among others. The Westinghouse loan was 15 times bigger than Solyndra’s. Odds are that taxpayers won’t get that federal loan money back.

The Westinghouse bankruptcy is just another sign of industry decline. Twelve reactor closures have been announced since 2015, although five of them have been reversed by bailouts. The speed of the decline will depend on how much the nuclear industry is cushioned by a plush, socialist-style welfare system draining the treasury, while the rest of us are subject to free market capitalism.

To help stop bailouts in your state, check out the Coalition Against Nuclear Bailouts (Ohio), Citi­zens Against Nuclear Bailouts (Pennsylvania), and Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

—PennEnergy, May 19, 2017; Christian Science Monitor, Mar. 30, 2017; The State, June 13, 2016; Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, Jan. 11, 2016; Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2011

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter Tagged With: nuclear power

June 22, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge 

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column Tagged With: cancer, fukushima, japan, nuclear, nuclear power, radiation, radioactive waste

June 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell. 

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency  power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

 The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste, Weekly Column Tagged With: fukushima, NRC, nuclear, nuclear power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, radiation, radioactive waste

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