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Atomic power promises wonderful benefits, but also some frightening possibilities

by Joe Tarr

There are two visions of what nuclear power could be. One is a dream that it could provide unlimited, cheap power for the world, pollution-free, screeching the brakes on global warming. The other is a nightmare that will lead to nuclear arms proliferation, leave the country vulnerable to catastrophic accidents and terrorist attacks, and leave lethal waste for the next 240,000 years.

As the country’s power generation system ages, people are giving the grand experiment with nuclear power a second look. When you fire up your computer, watch a movie, cook or fire up your stereo, the electricity coming into your house is most likely coming from a coal, nuclear or gas power plant that is 30 or 40 years old. The United States is going to have to invest in new sources of power generation.

On the surface, nuclear power is enticing. At a time when air pollution is reaching critical levels and carbon emissions from fossil fuels are accelerating global warming and threatening to cause climate change, many people think nuclear power could offer humans a way out of the power dilemma.

TVA is once again looking at nuclear power as a solution to growing power demand, restarting a reactor at Browns Ferry near Athens, Ala. and contemplating finishing a reactor in Bellefonte, Ala.

But others say nuclear power is not the panacea its supporters think it is. In fact, the concerns with it are so numerous and frightening, it would be a grave mistake to reinvest in nuclear energy.

Here is a cursory look at the key issues. They are vital because the country is on the verge of entering a new nuclear age and much is at stake: billions in tax and utility dollars, human lives, pollution, toxic waste, terrorism threats, nuclear arms proliferation, and human health.

Even if enviromentalists are wrong and it can be done safely, it has to be done well.

“Nuclear power is not necessarily inherently unsafe,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance to Clean Energy, which is against investing in nukes. “But it’s inherently unforgiving. If you make a mistake, it’s enormous.”

History

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered a speech to the United Nations about the dreadful age the world had entered, the nuclear era.

Eight years earlier, the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 240,000 people. Some say the scientists who had helped create such a devastating weapon and the people who decided to use it, were racked with guilt and seeking a way for their discoveries to be used for good.

The former general outlined the apocalypse that nuclear weapons could cause, but then went on to offer what he saw as a way out of the quagmire: Atoms for Peace.

“So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well being,” Eisenhower told the world’s leaders.

His plan was to create an international agency that would share nuclear power generation technology with the world. The United States would enrich the plutonium used in reactors at no cost to participating countries, if they would agree to submit to scrutiny of their plants, to ensure they didn’t use them to develop nuclear weapons.

For a while, the country did just that, and the nuclear power boom was on. (President Richard Nixon eventually reneged on the commitment, and other countries began enrichment programs, a policy that caused further proliferation of nuclear weapons.) According to a Greenpeace report, “Fiscal Fission: The Economic Failure of Nuclear Power,” from 1950 to 1990, U.S. taxpayers, consumers and investors spent an estimated $492 billion to develop and obtain nuclear power, of which $396 billion was spent by utilities, most of which was paid by utility customers. The government subsidized the rest.

The government subsidizes nuclear power in a number of ways. A lot of money is provided for research and development. And the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 (which has since been revised) provides taxpayer money to insure reactors in the event of a severe accident. (Currently all reactors are required to be insured to $300 million, with all reactors pitching in for a percentage to provide for an extra $95.8 million for an accident at any reactor. The U.S. government will pay for any costs beyond that amount.)

Recent energy bills have proposed low-interest loan guarantees and production tax credits. Of course, power generation is an area that the government has a clear interest in subsidizing. Environmentalists argue it should subsidize more benign power forms, such as renewable energy or cleaner forms of natural gas and coal.

“It’s not so much that we’re opposed to government involvement in developing energy policy. But nuclear energy is supposed to be a mature energy, but they still can’t lose the crutch of the U.S. tax payer,” says Paul Gunter, director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Center’s Reactor Watchdog Project.

“The nuclear power industry, which grew out of energy policy going back to the mid-’50s, never proved to be economically viable,” says Gunter. “From the very beginning and to this day, nuclear power development relies heavily on government assistance. So the industry has failed the market test, in terms of whether it’s an economic option for power development.”

TVA

The Tennessee Valley Authority was the most gung-ho about nuclear power of all U.S. utilities. In the mid-’60s, the utility announced plans to build 17 nuclear reactors. But the authority grossly over-estimated the demand for electricity, and under-estimated the cost for building the reactors. During this period, TVA’s debt swelled. Congress approved increases in the utility’s debt ceiling from $1.75 to $30 billion.

But when the energy crisis hit and the expected demand for power never materialized, TVA stopped construction on most of the reactors.

TVA’s reputation on nukes is abysmal. In his book, Tritium on Ice, Kenneth D. Bergeron writes: “[TVA’s] performance over the years in building and operating nuclear reactors is simply appalling, revealing it to be a fossilized, inefficient, unresponsive bureaucracy that is profoundly deficient in the management skills needed for such a complex and dangerous job.”

Bill Baxter admits TVA did a bad job with nuclear reactors early on. “In the ’70s and ’80s, every one of our reactors were shut down by the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission],” he says. “But all of these plants were brought back on line successfully and are operating at [the highest industry rating].

“Some of our units have set world records for record runs,” he adds.

Bergeron is thankful the utility has improved, but isn’t impressed. “For [Baxter] to say they’ve improved isn’t saying very much because they were by far the worst managed,” he says in a phone interview. Bergeron is a physicist who worked for 25 years at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque on safety of commercial and military reactors, and large sections of his book are devoted to TVA. “If they hadn’t improved, the NRC would not have let them restart.”

TVA began building Brown’s Ferry Unit 1 in 1967, and it would not be open until 1974. Unit 2 was opened a year later, and Unit 3 went active in 1977. Both Units 1 and 2 were shut down after a fire at the plant in 1975, which until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 was the worst incident at a reactor. During this period, all three of the Browns Ferry reactors ran poorly. Unit 1 was shut down in 1983 and has remained idle ever since; and Units 2 and 3 were shutdown in 1985, but were restarted in the early ’90s.

Now the TVA is looking at restarting Unit 1. The cost is estimated at $1.8 billion. Baxter says it’s on schedule and within budget.

Baxter is a fan of nuclear power, which he sees as a good component for meeting the power needs in the Tennessee Valley.

Right now, TVA’s five reactors produce about 20 percent of the utility’s energy; its 11 coal plants produce 53 percent; and dams about 12 percent.

TVA is also looking at starting up Bellefonte, a nuclear plant that was never completed. He foresees nuclear power increasing to about 30 percent of its output. So-called green power—wind, solar, methane gas from landfills—is also on the rise, but Baxter says they’re too small to meet the growing demand. “Nuclear is coming up, coal is coming down. Those will continue to be our workhorses,” he says.

“We’re not repeating any of mistakes of the past where we were wildly optimistic and ordered several plants,” Baxter adds. “But if we want to consider the eventual closing of any of our coal plants, where is that replacement power going to come from? The only source of low-cost, low-polluting power is nuclear.”

Nuclear is ideal, Baxter says, because it’s relatively cheap and much cleaner than fossil fuel. “Nuclear is capital intensive on the front end, but cheaper on the outset,” Baxter says. “With coal you’ve got to buy millions of tons of coal every year. Natural gas is a highly volatile, expensive fuel.”

The promise of nuclear power is not easily dismissed.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, nuclear energy saves 550 million tons of carbon emissions, 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxide, and 5.1 million tons of sulfur dioxide each year in the United States.

But some argue that nuclear plants aren’t as environmentally friendly or as cheap as its supporters say.

Numbers

There’s a dizzying disparity between the numbers provided by the industry folks and those that environmental activists cite.

Industry claims nuclear power is among the cheapest power sources available, easily beating out coal, natural gas and renewables. Bill Baxter says nuclear costs about 2-1/2 cents per kilowatt-hour, coal is 4-1/2 cents kilowatt-hour, and natural gas is 6-1/2 cents. He says these figures include the cost of building the plants, as well as disposing of the waste (Technically nuclear waste hasn’t been disposed of at all, but a fund to pay for the waste has accumulated $20 billion, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute).

Environmentalists take issue with these numbers. “I can promise you that if [nuclear energy was so cheap], people would be building nuclear power plants,” Smith says. “Operation and maintenance at any given moment can be low. But it doesn’t factor in the capital costs to build the plant. It doesn’t factor in the decommission costs or the subsidies.”

A 1990 Pace University report entitled “Environmental Costs of Electricity” estimated nuclear power costs 10 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to 6 to 8.3 cents for coal, 4 to 6 cents for natural gas, 5 to 12 cents for wind, and 8 to 20 cents for solar (fuel costs, especially for natural gas, are likely to have changed since then). With environmental costs factored in—including costs of accidents and decommissioning—nuclear power jumps from 12.9 to 17.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, the study found.

In the United States there are 103 active reactors, producing about 20 percent of the country’s electricity. Worldwide there are 441 reactors, which produce about 16 percent of the globe’s power. The United States has the most reactors of any country, but as a percentage of its power production, this country is way down the list. France gets 75 percent of its power from nukes.

How They Work, Or Don’t

Nuclear power plants operate much like any fossil fuel plant does. Steam is heated to drive turbines. But instead of burning coal or gas as a heat source, an atomic reaction is started inside the reactors, which creates intense heat.

The nuclear industry trumpets the technology as being pollution-free. It’s true that reactors emit no air pollution or greenhouse gases, which are accelerating global warming.

“Is it an environmentally benign energy? No way,” Smith says. “If you take a snapshot of when a plant is running, it does not have an emission stream like a coal plant.”

But reactors do pollute. They release radioactive tritium particles into air, says Michele Boyd, of Public Citizen, a group that advocates for citizen, health and government accountability. Reactors need vast amounts of water to keep the reactors from melting down—that water causes thermal pollution when it’s released into rivers, along which most plants are located, disrupting and killing aquatic life and polluting water sources. There’s also pollution—and radioactive contamination—where uranium is mined. Perhaps most significantly, there’s waste that’s produced (more on that later).

What’s tricky about nuclear power plants is safety. Bergeron explains in his book that fission products produced from a nuclear reaction are highly radioactive, much moreso than the uranium fuel rods. “Fission products can never be allowed to come into contact with human beings,” he writes. These fission products also produce heat within the fuel rods, called decay heat.

“The problem is that the decay heat doesn’t shut off when the reactor is shut off,” he writes.

“It is decay heat that makes the engineering of nuclear power plants as difficult as it is. The system must be designed to ensure that high-pressure water continues to flow through the core even after shutdown,” he writes. “Safety systems must ensure that this flow continues under any plausible set of circumstances, including massive earthquakes, electric grid failures, operator errors, tornados—essentially anything that is reasonably possible over the life of a power plant. If water were to stop flowing in the core, it would be only a matter of hours before the core and all the steel structures holding it in place melted into a red hot liquid that would proceed to melt through the foot-thick-steel pressure vessel in which it is enclosed.”

Because the stakes are so high, nuclear reactors are required to have myriad safety systems to make sure the reaction can be shut down and that water flow never stops. These safety features are what make them expensive to operate.

For the most part, they do run safely. There have not been any major accidents in the United States. The Three Mile Island accident in 1979 was the country’s worst, but there were no direct casualties.

But the risks are high.

“We know people are going to screw up. You don’t need to take that risk when there’s more elegant and more environmentally sound technology,” Smith says. “We’re on the cusp of having to spend billions of dollars for new power generation. So we’ve got to make some choices. If we choose to go down the nuclear path again...and then there’s a problem like Three Mile Island, I can promise you public opinion will turn against [nuclear power]. Then you’ve potentially wasted billions of dollars. Nuclear power has a fragile public support system. I think that’s a huge risk. And I don’t think there’s a reason to take that risk.”

The NRC

Smith calls it the “perfect storm” scenario, a recipe for a nuclear catastrophe that could kill people and contaminate the land.

Many nuclear power reactors are running at the end of their planned 40-year life, but their operators are applying for extensions (12 life extensions have been granted so far, and the NRC has yet to deny an application). These same plants are producing more electricity than they were designed for. And they’re being operated at a time when the NRC is loosening its regulations for reactors. To top it off, these reactors are at serious security risk from terrorists.

Critics of the U.S. nuclear energy program say problems began at the start. The original agency overseeing the industry—the Atomic Energy Commission—was in charge of both regulating reactors and promoting nuclear energy. It was eventually split into two groups, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy. But it wasn’t until the Three-Mile-Island accident that the NRC began to fulfill its regulatory duties.

Critics say there’s still a conflict of interest because the NRC gets its funding from the nuclear industry. Citizen and environmental groups say the NRC has slipped back into complacency in recent years, forsaking safety in favor of promotion.

“The industry’s efforts to keep nuclear power plants from going under and keeping hope alive of building new ones has revolved around reducing the federal oversight,” Gunter says.

A couple of recent incidents demonstrate this point, Gunter says. The NRC allowed the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio to continue operating, despite serious safety concerns that should have forced its shutdown. An emergency shutdown was later required. An investigation by the Office of Inspector General found that the NRC put financial concerns above those of public safety. “NRC appears to have informally established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety, before it will act to shut down a power plant,” the OIG report found.

The reactor was idle for two years while repairs were made. When it finally restarted this year, it was shut down after only a day, because of another equipment malfunction.

The second incident involves a regulation that was established after a fire at the Browns Ferry plant in 1975. The fire started when workers were examining shafts of electrical cables, using a candle to check for air leaks—a violation of safety codes, according to Bergeron. The fire burned for seven hours and the standard and backup systems for keeping water flowing were lost. But a meltdown was avoided.

The fire led to new regulations requiring fire barriers around all electric cables, which control the shutdown of the reactors, Gunter says. An NRC report from last June found “there are numerous instances where licensees are relying on ‘operator manual actions’ that have not been approved by the NRC.”

Gunter explains: “Because they were unable to meet that fire code, they have sacrificed that function. Instead they will send somebody—potentially through smoke, fire and maybe even into areas under [terrorist] attack—to manually shut down equipment that was formerly shutdown from the control room,” Gunter says. “They have by and large substituted unapproved, inoperable safety shutdown systems. Now what the NRC is proposing to do is codify these illegal systems and make them legal.

“I’m offering this to you as a demonstration of where the nuclear regulation commission is backing away from proscriptive regulation put into law because of an actual accident in Alabama,” he adds. “Because the industry is both non-compliant and non-reliant, the NRC is going to change the regulations to a standard the industry is willing to meet. That’s happening across the board.”

“It’s a little like civil disobedience, but we’re talking about corporate disobedience to fire safety regulations.”

Cutting Slack

Proponents of nuclear power say the NRC’s regulations are too stringent. Asked why no one is building new reactors if the power is so cheap, Baxter responds: “Regulatory uncertainty. It’s become almost impossible for [utilities] to get all the permits.”

The NRC has approved three standardized designs for reactors, which should make them cheaper to build and easier to maintain and regulate.

The NRC and the industry are also pushing for a new streamlined permitting process for new nuclear plants—a process that is now being tested in a pilot program—that will allow operators to get a combined construction and operating license. Thelma Wiggins, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, says that because there were numerous permitting stages under the old process, construction of reactors could drag on for years, with anti-nuke groups fighting approval at every step of the way.

The new process will allow for all the concerns to be addressed at once, she says. “[Utilities] would go and get started and the process would get impeded and there were major delays. Then you had capital money being lost,” she says. “What this process is trying to do is eliminate these delays.”

Anti-nuclear groups see the new process as a way of minimizing public comment. “It seems absolutely ridiculous to me. [Under the proposed rules] you can give someone an operating permit before they’ve even constructed it,” says Boyd, of Public Citizen. “They don’t even have to say where they’re going to build this reactor, they just have to apply for a reactor. How could you possibly evaluate it?”

Public comment on nuclear reactors would be allowed before a company had decided whether to actually construct one, she says, so public awareness would be low. The intent is to shut citizens out of the process, she says.

Wiggins disagrees. “The new process doesn’t minimize those issues and concerns [that caused delays]. What it does is address them up front. We want to look at anything pertaining to safety and maintenance—but we want to look at those up front,” Wiggins says.

Bergeron says he’s seen a disturbing trend at the NRC. “Especially in the last 10 or 15 years, the agency has become too concerned about people feeling good about nuclear energy and not assessing the dangers,” he says. “You have to have a government regulator that takes the side of the people. I worry that NRC is becoming less and less obsessed with public safety.”

Waste

When nuclear power was born in the 1950s, scientists involved assumed they’d figure out what to do with spent fuel in due time. More than 50 years later, it’s an issue that remains unresolved.

On its website, the Nuclear Energy Institute cheerily declares that “high-level nuclear ‘waste’ is really used nuclear fuel,” which is true enough. The problem is that it’s highly radioactive, even moreso than the fuel used to create atomic reactions.

Almost all nuclear waste is now being stored at the reactors where it was created. “On the banks of the Tennessee River they’ve got all this highly radioactive stuff just sitting there, because they don’t know what to do with it,” Smith says.

The federal government is responsible for dealing with the waste. The current proposal is to send the waste from all the reactors in the country to the Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada. Shipment might start in 2015, but the Nevada government is fighting to stop it. Although it’s in a remote area, there are questions as to whether it’s a good site, because it’s on an earthquake fault. Also, workers tunneling the first five miles were exposed to high levels of silica, which can cause cancer.

Others are worried about the transportation lines necessary to move the waste. Special transportation containers have been designed and are certified by the NRC. “This certification process ensures that shipping containers can withstand accidents more serious than any potential incident without releasing any radioactive material,” the Nuclear Energy Institute reports.

One scientist discovered a way to turn waste into a more stable (but still radioactive) glass, which could then be put in steel canisters and more safely stored. But it’s an extremely expensive process that would make nuclear power much more costly.

Other countries are contemplating firing waste into the sun, putting it under the Earth’s crust, and underneath Antarctic ice sheets. Nuclear waste stays dangerous for an incredibly long time—240,000 years.

“Think about how long 240,000 years is. When did Columbus sail the ocean blue? When was Christ alive? What do we have in any of recorded history that goes back more than 10,000 years?” Smith says. “People don’t put that stuff in perspective when we fire up our hairdryer or turn on our TV. We’re generating toxic waste that’s going to be dangerous for more than recorded time. There’s something fundamentally unethical about that.”

Terrorism and Missiles

A physicist who worked with nuclear power for 25 years, Bergeron used to be more hopeful about it. “Ten years ago, when I was working on nuclear power safety issues, I felt the promise of nuclear power had been betrayed by its implementers,” he says, noting that he’s no fan of coal, which has devastated communities where it’s mined and causes a great deal of pollution.

“I’m becoming more negative about nuclear. That’s because of the whole issue of terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to small nations or non-state groups,” he says.

“There is the possibility of using a power plant as a nuclear weapon. The NRC’s official viewpoint on this is it’s impossible to calculate the probability of a terrorist attack, therefore we can’t consider it,” he says. “I think that’s unbelievably irresponsible.”

The nuclear industry insists the plants are very safe from attack. The reports are mixed. The nuclear industry has gotten high marks for security from The Progressive Policy Institute (an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council), The Washington Post, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Service Employees International Union accused Wackenhut, the security firm contracted to protect many nuclear facilities (it protects the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, but not any TVA facilities), with not adequately training its guards and cheating on training drills.

So much information about nuclear plants has become classified since Sept. 11 that it’s hard to know exactly what the industry and government have done to protect them. You cannot tour any TVA plants, and the secure areas around each reactor have been expanded.

Even critics admit that security has been tightened. But they say the real danger is from aircraft crashes or short-range explosives, particularly at the cooling pools and waste storage units, which don’t have the structural fortification that the reactors have.

“I think there probably have been increases in security,” Gunter says. “Our concern is they’ve not been substantial enough. You can put out all the jersey barriers and cones and upgrade the number of guards, but that’s not going to protect against substandard fire protection or structural vulnerabilities to aircraft penetration. Those are the areas the industry continues to stonewall. It’s purely out of financial concern.”

Others say it’s simply impossible to protect so many nuclear reactors from attack. “In a post 9-11 world, we’re actually foolish to mess with nuclear power when we’ve seen what people are capable of,” says Smith. “You will never see Al Qaeda run an airplane into a wind turbine. They’re not going to break the sun panels on a house. They may try to blow up a nuclear power plant. It’s ironic to me that the people who scream loudest about national security are the most supportive of nuclear power.”

Another fear among anti-nuclear activists is one of proliferation. Every country that now has the bomb achieved it by developing nuclear power first.

A keystone of the Atoms for Peace program that Eisenhower started was that nuclear energy and weapons functions should be kept separate. It was also a cornerstone of every non-proliferation treaty and the U.S. has always discouraged other countries from using their power plants for bomb production.

But two years ago, the United States broke that taboo by allowing TVA to produce tritium at Watts Bar and Sequoyah for its nuclear missiles, which are now being refurbished.

End Game

The fact remains that the United States is going to have to invest in new power generation. Power use will likely increase by 40 percent by 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“America needs and the world needs all the electricity sources we can get,” Wiggins says. “We need nuclear, coal, solar, hydro, wind—we need all of it.”

Baxter says there’s 200 years worth of coal still in the ground, but further reliance on coal is hardly an attractive prospect.

Smith says the answer isn’t so complicated. There needs to be major investment in two things—conservation and renewable energy sources. An aggressive conservation program could cut current energy use by 30 percent, he says.

“Some people want to shut down all nuclear plants,” he says. “Our position is you’ve got about 100 of these things producing 20 percent of the country’s power. Don’t shut them down, just don’t extend the life of them and don’t build any more. It was a good experiment.”

“If we had no other options maybe we should have a serious conversation about nuclear power. But we have other options and a lot of this is stuff we should be doing anyway,” he says.

Bergeron says ultimately people will decide by what they’re willing to pay for. They could pay for safer power generation, or take a gamble on nukes.

“Solar sounds like a great idea, but there’s a question of do the citizens want to pay the price of two to three times [of what they are paying] for energy,” Bergeron says. “Even if the right answer is renewables, if that’s not what the people want, that’s life. They get to choose.”

April 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 17 © 2004 Metro Pulse