Article in "The Ecologist"

[Aaron Oakley <aoakley@receptor.pharm.uwa.edu.au>]

The following article appeared in "The Ecologist".

I am considering writing a detailed analysis
on this item, so once again,
comments from radsafers are invited!



8<____________________________________________________





Nuclear Power: 
Time to End the Experiment
page 1 of 4

The new millennium presents the ideal symbolic opportunity for a final
shutdown of nuclear power - a technology that has failed us in every arena
since it was first conceived.
By Peter Bunyard and Pete Roche

As we enter the 21st century, we carry with us an outmoded, dangerous
technology that has left a legacy of irretrievable contamination, and a
trail of disease, death and runaway costs. Nuclear power is clearly no
longer economic, if it ever was. Nowhere in the world has the industry
been able to demonstrate that it can safely deal with the highly dangerous
wastes that are an inevitable consequence of the nuclear fuel cycle. The
dream of a reactor which can generate its own fuel by burning plutonium
extracted from ordinary reactor waste has never materialised; thus
removing the whole raison d'tre for 'reprocessing'. Chernobyl, Three Mile
Island, Windscale and numerous other accidents have blown apart the myth
that nuclear power is safe, and, even under normal operation, nuclear
facilities contaminate our environment irrevocably. 

With such a legacy, one might expect the industry to die quietly. But, far
from admitting defeat, the nuclear industry is attempting to make a
comeback - hoping that governments will turn to it to help solve the
problem of climate change (see box on page xx). At the last Climate
Conference in Buenos Aires, the nuclear industry was the single largest
lobby group. In the meantime, the industry ticks over, extending the life
of decrepit old reactors and selling the odd reactor to unsuspecting
developing countries. 

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear industry's history is
the wasted opportunity. Huge sums of public money have been spent
subsidising research, waste-management and decommissioning, which could
have been better spent on new industries more suited to the demands of the
next millennium, like the offshore wind industry, solar photovoltaics, or
energy efficiency, and tackling the scourge of fuel poverty. But one thing
should be very clear to environmentalists as the 21st century dawns - it
is time now to despatch this industry to 'meet its maker', before it is
resurrected in a new guise, and contaminates our hopes and dreams for the
new century as it has for the last five decades. 

Shored-up by Subsidies
In the past, the nuclear industry has survived on massive subsidies,
indirect and direct, with billions of dollars spent worldwide. Economic
competition was stifled. But deregulation of the electricity supply
industry has now exposed the true cost of nuclear power, without even
taking decommissioning and radioactive waste-management into account, nor
indeed the legacy of disease and death. As a consequence, the nuclear
industry is in the doldrums, with no orders for new reactors anywhere in
Europe or the United States.

Even a year before the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979, the love
affair of US utilities with nuclear power had begun to sour. Cancellations
began in the 1970s, and every reactor ordered after 1973 - some 120 in all
- was subsequently cancelled. Nevertheless, that spate of orders in the
1960s and early 70s for light-water reactors has given the US the dubious
status of being number one nuclear reactor power in the world. It now
generates approximately 30 per cent of the world's nuclear electricity,
followed by France with 17 per cent, Japan 11 per cent and the former
Soviet Union 10 per cent. The rest is made up mainly of nuclear power in
Britain, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, China and India.

In 1974, in an exuberant overstatement, the International Atomic Energy
Agency of the United Nations forecast that by 2000 the world would have
4,450 gigawatts (1 GW = 1 billion watts) of nuclear capacity. By 1996,
though, total installed capacity was just one twelfth of that. By 1990,
predictions were more modest. The UK Atomic Energy Authority anticipated
that the world would have 1,000 GW of nuclear electricity by 2020. 

Nuclear Power: 
Time to End the Experiment
page 2 of 4

The Nuclear Survival Strategy
The miserable myth that nuclear power is cheap, safe and clean has also
run out of currency, and if the industry limps into the 21st century, then
it should simply be used to deal with the mess that it has landed us in.
Of course, this is not the way the industry sees it. Worldwide, it has
developed a three-pronged survival strategy: 

 First: Extend the life of existing reactors, and move into Eastern Europe
to refurbish old and highly dangerous Soviet-designed reactors. 
 Second: Promote new reactors in a few unsuspecting developing countries. 
 Third: Promote nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. 

British Nuclear Fuels Ltd's (BNFL) latest Annual Report proudly boasts
that its Magnox reactors saved over 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
compared with producing the same electricity by coal. BNFL wants to
"maximise the safe and economic lifetimes of the Magnox stations so that
they can continue to help the UK meet its Kyoto climate change targets."
And BNFL has its eyes on the future, highlighting "the need for
replacement nuclear capacity . . . over the next couple of decades". 

But the Magnox reactors are already well past their intended lifespan. If
BNFL gets permission to extend their lives for 50 years, as it has done
already for Chapelcross and Calder Hall, the last of these decrepit old
reactors will not close until 2021. Magnox spent fuel reprocessing,
together with Calder Hall, cause the vast majority of the radioactive
discharges from the Sellafield site to the atmosphere and the Irish Sea.
Doses to members of the public living near Magnox reactors or to people
who frequently walk past the perimeter fence are often well in excess of
the recommended dose constraint of 0.3mSv per year from any one [new]
site. The doses from Chapelcross are particularly large, because of the
vast amounts of tritium discharged to the atmosphere caused by the
manufacture of tritium for Britain's nuclear weapons programme. On top of
this, Magnox reactors are exceedingly inefficient and can only generate
around one tenth of the electricity of a Pressurised Water Reactor for
every tonne of nuclear waste produced. 

Meanwhile British Energy, the privatised operator of the UK's newer
nuclear reactors, has teamed up with a US partner - Peco Energy - to form
AmerGen. AmerGen aims to buy 'under-performing' US nuclear stations and
improve their profitability. The company is in the process of buying the
nuclear power station on Three Mile Island and three other nuclear reactor
sites in the US. Peco is now planning to merge with Unicom, another US
nuclear utility, thus creating the biggest nuclear operator in the United
States.

As well as extending the lives of reactors in the West, another part of
the industry's strategy is to gain work modifying East European Reactors
to bring them up to so-called 'Western safety standards'. The safety of
nuclear reactors in Eastern Europe has been a concern for over a decade.
The continued operation of the first generation of Soviet nuclear reactors
represents a monumental failure of political will on the part of European
Union governments. As far back as 1992, at the Munich G7 summit, it was
agreed that they were dangerous, could not be made safe and should be
closed as soon as possible. Yet seven years later they continue to
operate, and may do so for years to come. Other reactors are slated for
upgrading, at the EU's expense. Continued statements about upgrading
Soviet-designed reactors to 'Western' standards creates a false sense of
security among the Western public, and glosses over the fact that
dangerous reactors are being allowed to continue operating. 

The industry, of course, has not given up all hope of building new
reactors in countries willing to put their head on the block. Top of the
list is Turkey, scene of an earthquake in August. Three consortia put in
bids in October 1997 to build a plant at Akkuyu Bay on the Mediterranean
coast. Westinghouse, now owned by BNFL, Siemens of Germany, Framatome of
France and Atomic Energy Canada Ltd are all there as members of one or
other of the consortia. Despite the advice of the International Atomic
Energy Agency that reactors should not be built near active faults, Akkuyu
is only 13 miles west of the Ecemis fault line.


Nuclear Power: 
Time to End the Experiment
page 3 of 4

A Nuclear Renaissance?
The industry in the West sees climate change as its best hope for a
renaissance in its home market (see box on page xx). It holds itself up as
the supreme solution to global warming, as reactors do not emit carbon
dioxide or methane. But that argument ignores the fossil fuels burnt to
extract uranium and build nuclear power plants. It ignores safety,
security and health issues, and it ignores fundamental economics in which
it has been shown that 'buck for buck' renewable energy sources, energy
conservation and even state-of-the-art modern fossil fuel plants will
reduce carbon emissions far more effectively than recourse to nuclear
power. British Energy has called for "tradeable carbon permits". If these
were introduced, it claims, "new nuclear build would rapidly become
economic". But this claim is fundamentally flawed. The 'competitiveness
gap' of new nuclear plant is too great. In other words, a carbon tax which
was high enough to make new nuclear build competitive would be
prohibitively expensive. Barker concludes that it "would be highly
imprudent to assume that new nuclear build could make a contribution to
achieving carbon dioxide reduction targets beyond 2010.". 

The Nuclear Legacy
As long ago as 1976, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
concluded that "there should be no commitment to a large programme of
nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable
doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived,
highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future." 

The nuclear programme since 1976 may not have been as large as once
feared, but the industry has been left with a free hand to continue
producing its toxic waste, despite having absolutely no idea where to put
it. For decades the industry has claimed it could 'dispose' of its nuclear
wastes by burying them deep underground. Yet, after spending 450 million
of public money, plans to start digging the first phase of the UK's
nuclear waste dump at Sellafield were rejected by the Secretary of State
for the Environment in March 1997. This decision, and the evidence that
led to it, signals the failure of the concept of deep disposal of
long-lived radioactive waste. There is clearly no sustainable solution for
radioactive waste, so no new nuclear waste should be created. Waste that
already exists should be stored above ground in managed, monitored dry
stores on existing nuclear sites. It should be retrievable so that
problems can be dealt with or technologies improved.

In the US, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the government ordered
utilities to pay 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by
their nuclear plants to offset the costs of a nationwide repository
programme, to be opened in 1998. With $4 billion spent and little to show,
the utilities pressed for interim above-ground centralised storage in a
'Monitored Retrievable Storage' installation, preferably sited in New
Mexico on land belonging to native peoples. That scheme too has now been
rejected. 

To date, the radioactive waste, including spent fuel, from the world's
nuclear plants, contains some 100 billion curies, all of which has to be
isolated from the environment for centuries to come. This is 1,000 times
more radioactivity than was blown out from the core of Chernobyl. 

Nuclear Power: 
Time to End the Experiment
page 4 of 4

Reprocessing - the Emperor with No Clothes
Aside from running the UK's ancient Magnox reactors, BNFL run the
notorious Sellafield (ne Windscale) site. Until its relatively recent
expansion into the US, BNFL's main business was reprocessing. Reprocessing
separates plutonium and unused uranium from spent nuclear waste fuel. It
is a process that is completely unnecessary, and far more expensive than
storing the spent fuel once it is discharged from a reactor. A host of
recent events have severely damaged the long-term prospects for
reprocessing. From the decision of the new German government to phase out
nuclear power to the commitment made by north-east Atlantic States to
achieve "substantial reductions" in radioactive discharges to the marine
environment by 2000, the writing is on the wall for reprocessing.

BNFL's spent nuclear waste fuel reprocessing business ought to be on its
last legs. You might even be able to hear BNFL employees saying as much in
private. Neil Baldwin, head of reprocessing at Sellafield recently
admitted to Sunday Business that, because of problems, its new Thermal
Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) would struggle to meet the ten-year
target on which the plant's 500m profit forecast is based. Although BNFL
still, rather optimistically, believes THORP will make a profit, the
performance of the plant has cast a shadow over the future of
reprocessing. With part-privatisation looming, the company now envisages
its growth coming from decommissioning, clean-up work and providing
services to existing nuclear power stations. Through its American arm,
BNFL Inc, the company has already secured decommissioning contracts in the
States worth more than $8bn. 

Yet, with an almost-religious fervour BNFL maintains its obsession with a
highly dangerous radio-toxic element which can be used to make nuclear
weapons - plutonium. Originally it was thought that the plutonium
separated during reprocessing would be used in fast reactors - apart from
that required for nuclear weapons programmes. Fast reactors were the
alchemist's dream: they would generate as much fuel as they consumed while
producing electricity. But dreams transform into nightmares, and the
problem with fast reactors is their potential for massive explosions and
catastrophic contamination of millions of hectares of land. Not one fast
reactor has operated satisfactorily. Sodium leakages and fires have
plagued fast reactors in the UK, the Soviet Union and Japan. France's
Superphnix has proved to be an economic and operational disaster. The
Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor is now being decommissioned, and the
Japanese fast breeder reactor at Monju, has been closed since an accident
in 1995. It is not clear when, or even whether, it will start up again.

Without fast reactors, the reprocessing industry needs to invent new
justifications to continue its crazy practice of separating plutonium from
spent nuclear waste fuel. Sellafield now has a stockpile of 90 tonnes of
weapons-usable plutonium and this figure is expected to grow to 150 tonnes
by 2010. BNFL argues that reprocessing is a form of recycling:

"Reprocessing used fuel recovers 97 per cent of valuable, reusable
materials and separates out the remaining 3 per cent which is ultimately
waste. The reusable material is uranium and plutonium, which can be
recycled to produce Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel." 

Reprocessed uranium actually makes up the bulk of the material separated
during reprocessing. Spent fuel may contain one per cent plutonium at
most. However, there is a very poor commercial case for recycling this
uranium. BNFL was planning a new facility at Springfields to manufacture
fuel from it, but work has been suspended because of a lack of interest
from its customers. The lack of demand arises because fuel fabricated
using reprocessed uranium is significantly more expensive than that made
from fresh uranium, because it has to be processed separately from fresh
uranium on account of contamination problems. Furthermore, an oversupply
of uranium on the market means that this position is likely to persist for
the foreseeable future. 

Nuclear Smuggling
Theft of fissile material has become a terrifying prospect with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Rensselaer Lee, in Smuggling Armageddon (St
Martin's Press, 1998), points out that "nuclear crime was uncommon in the
Soviet period", but that, with the loss of status and special salaries
once enjoyed by the thousands working in military nuclear complexes,
survival is driving many to steal. According to data from the
International Atomic Energy Agency, 132 confirmed incidents of
international nuclear smuggling took place between 1993 and 1996. In 1993,
two nuclear warheads were actually stolen from a weapons assembly plant in
the Urals, but were later recovered. And just as disturbing, credible
reports indicate that "criminal groups have commandeered the isotope
separation services of Russian nuclear plants to expedite exports of
enriched reactor-grade and weapons-grade uranium to various end-user
countries in the Middle East and South Asia."

Lee records one case of an engineer working at the Luch's
Scientific-Production Association in Podolsk, who managed to steal a total
of 1.5 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium on more than 20 separate
occasions. The man was later arrested. About 30 tonnes of separated
plutonium are stored in some 12,000 flasks at the Chelyabinsk nuclear
facility. Safeguarding such a quantity of fissile material is a major
security problem.

It is a nonsense to believe that burning plutonium in a reactor will
actually get rid of it. On the contrary, although plutonium is consumed,
more gets generated in the reactor and, by means of reprocessing, the
problem of environmental contamination and security is perpetuated. After
denying for years that reactor-grade plutonium can be used to make a
successful atomic warhead, the UK Government finally accepted that it
could in 1997. The US actually exploded such a device in 1962. 

A Legacy of Contamination
Chernobyl is a constant reminder of the risks we are taking by keeping the
nuclear industry alive. But without close follow-up of all the victims of
Chernobyl, including those across Western Europe who were also exposed to
fallout, we will never know the full extent of the harm done. The overall
cost in monetary terms will amount to tens of billions of dollars,
probably more than the total construction cost of all the Soviet Union's
nuclear plants. The nuclear establishment is loath to admit to any
additional cancers, congenital malformations and deaths from Chernobyl.
Yet, where public health records are supposedly good, as in Bavaria, we
now have evidence that the fallout caused a significant increase in
stillbirths and in infant mortality. Even so, the authorities tried to
cover up, and it is thanks to such as Richard Webb, who revealed the
incompetent defects in the epidemiological models used, that the truth has
come out. 

It is not just the risks of major accidents that should concern us. Even
under normal operation, the industry is contaminating our environment. The
French reprocessing plant at La Hague, for example, spews 230 million
litres of radioactive waste into the English Channel every year. As Chris
Busby, Rosalie Bertell and others show in this issue, low-dose radiation
is far more dangerous, perhaps a hundred times more, than is accounted for
by such organisations as the International Commission on Radiological
Protection (ICRP). That makes the nuclear industry far dirtier and more
dangerous than it likes to think. 

An inspection into the state of intermediate level radioactive waste in
the UK by the Health and Safety Executive has revealed that, at 22 sites
across the UK, waste is in danger of leaking and in some instances could
even go 'critical' and explode. Neglect and shoddy practice is now dogging
the industry, and clean-up operations will cost billions of pounds. Last
year saw the Atomic Energy Authority pilloried for its mismanagement of
nuclear materials at Dounreay, and the Ministry of Defence for more than
100 "serious and quality failures in just three months last year" at its
weapons-manufacturing site at Aldermaston. Decades of neglect have turned
Sellafield into the most contaminated radioactive site in Western Europe.
In its report, the Health and Safety Executive reveals overheating
problems and leakage of radioactive contaminated water into the ground
from raw, untreated nuclear waste, much of it the legacy of Britain's
haste to manufacture nuclear weapons. 

With extraordinary prescience, the Smithsonian Institution once proclaimed
that nuclear power would be a "short-lived" phenomenon. As we head into
the next century, we must fulfil that prediction. Decommissioning and
clean-up should now be the nuclear industry's only role, along with
sealing its dangerous plutonium into an inaccessible form, such as with
vitrified high-level waste. But none of this new effort will ever
compensate the people of the late twentieth century for the escape of
plutonium and other radionuclides into our environment.


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