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Nuclear Power
A while back, June 10,
2008, in one of my discussions of energy (Article 1, Chapter 11), I promised to
explain why I’m not a fan of nuclear power. That is a Dusie of an
understatement. I think nuclear power, and by that I mean generating electricity
with nuclear reactors, is unacceptably dangerous.
Recent events following
the earthquake, tsunami and damage to the Fukashima Daichi nuclear power plants
have revived public awareness of the danger of nuclear power, but not
sufficiently to dissuade advocates here, and the government agencies and
officials who have advocated for nuclear power as an alternative to fuels that
produce CO2, to stop urging more nuclear power plant construction. The industry
emphasizes that nuclear plants don’t generate CO2, but fails to acknowledge
what else they do generate.
The basic problem with
nuclear power is the toxicity of radiation that it produces. From the low-level
radioactive material that is constantly being released into the environment,
either through cooling systems or ventilations systems, to spent fuel, to low
and high level radioactive waste generated in the normal operation of the
plant, to the plant itself, which will continue to be dangerously, or fatally,
radioactive for many hundreds or thousands of years after the plant is no
longer in operation, to the extremely carcinogenic plutonium that is produced
by the reactions that occur in the plant, everything about nuclear power is
dangerous beyond human ability to control, anticipate or eliminate.
Let me cut to the chase
here. It is all about hubris. That is, the false assumption that we know it
all. We don’t and can’t know everything.
No engineer can predict
ahead of time what events may befall a nuclear plant that he is designing. Not
one of them has a crystal ball to predict the future. None of the designers of
the Fukashima Daichi plant anticipated an earthquake of 9 on the Richter scale,
followed by a huge tsunami. But it happened anyway. Many well-intentioned
engineers work on these questions, but their answers are always inherently
defective. The nuclear power industry has concocted complex procedures to
identify potential ways a plant could experience a failure, but there is no way
to predict human stupidity, and many plant failures (think Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl) have happened because the plant operators didn’t follow the
approved operations manual. Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they misunderstood
the procedures. Maybe they thought they understood what would happen and were
wrong.
So the first reason not
to use nuclear power is that for the system to be safe, it can’t rely, as it
must, on humans, who are not reliable. It isn’t that they are necessarily bad
people, they are just human. A mistake, either in design or operation, can
condemn thousands of people to injury and death, for thousands of years.
The second reason is
that there are people out there who would like to harm everyone who don’t think
as they do. We saw in 2001 how a group of men, who were willing to die for
their cause, could destroy the World Trade Center and severely damage the
Pentagon. They spent a relatively short time preparing for their suicide
mission. What happened afterward? We cleaned up the mess and moved on.
Now imagine that their
target was a nuclear power plant, or all of the nuclear power plants in the US
or in the world. And assume that they were willing to spend years, or
lifetimes, preparing to infiltrate, as employees, the companies that operate
the plants.
America has 104
operating nuclear power plants. How many corrupted nuclear plant operators
would it take to turn all of them into dirty bombs equivalent to Fukashima
Daichi? We know that the problems at Fukashima occurred because the
earthquake and tsunami (we don’t know yet which of these, or if it was the
combination) caused the plant’s safety systems to fail.
In a terrorist scenario,
with the terrorist or terrorists inside the plants, the safety systems could
simply be turned off or disabled by the terrorists. So the assumption that the
plant operators would act to prevent a meltdown or explosion is invalid. Giving
the plant’s automatic machinery the ability to override human inputs is equally
stupid, because events can occur that are unforeseen and require human action
to prevent the situation from worsening. Either way is a recipe for failure,
and you can’t just clean up a nuclear accident and continue on as before.
The third reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that the people telling us it is
safe, the nuclear industry, cannot be relied on to tell the truth. They have a
vested interest in building and operating nuclear power plants and will make
millions of dollars if those decisions are made in their favor. So they must be
presumed to be speaking in their own best interest, and not necessarily in the
rest of the public’s best interest.
They not only might lie
to us, we know that they have lied to us in the past, when the lie would
influence a decision in their favor. Just one example will suffice, but there
are many more. In the 1970s, when the Florida Power and Light Turkey Point
Plant near Homestead, Florida went on line, the thermal discharges into
Biscayne Bay killed all of the plant life and much of the animal life in the
vicinity of the discharge point.
My wife, who I did not know
at the time, was snorkeling in the area and personally witnessed the
destruction that was occurring. Shortly thereafter, a FPL spokesperson at a
public hearing she attended on the subject, testified that there was “lush
turtle-grass” around the discharge point. He didn’t go on to say that the “lush
turtle-grass” was all dead turtle-grass, but that was the truth.
Such lies are typical of
what we get from the industry, and they make those statements, as individual
company employees because their employer wants them to and they don’t have the
integrity to tell the truth, or because they really believe what they are
saying, and the corporations make those statements in official documents
because it is in their financial interest to do so.
The fourth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that if an accident happens, like
Humpty Dumpty, no one can make the situation go away. No one can undo the
damage, at least not during the lifetimes of anyone living today. This is not
like a plane crash, or the World Trade Center attack, where we clean up the
mess and life goes on. Human life in the impacted area effectively ends with a
nuclear event. For those who would like to see what this looks like at
Chernobyl, I recommend that the reader look at the photos and narrative at http://www.kiddofspeed.com. The
Chernobyl accident impacted only a relatively small town, but today in the
United States we have major nuclear power plants adjacent to and upwind of many
major metropolitan centers.
The fifth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that the companies, on whom we rely
to be responsible for their safe operation, are subject to state and federal
laws regarding corporations. Those laws enable them to declare bankruptcy and
walk away from their responsibilities if the cost of a cleanup exceeds their
ability to pay. The laws, principles and concepts of risk, responsibility and
liability that have developed over the centuries are simply not applicable to
an industry that has the ability to make an item or a region fatally toxic for
thousands of years.
In the case of a nuclear
plant, the amount of damage an accident could do, particularly near a big city,
is many times, perhaps thousands of times, the value of all of the assets of
the corporation that owns or operates the plant. Have an accident, the company
goes bankrupt, and the cost of cleaning up falls on the government. Then the
government discovers that it doesn’t have any technology capable of cleaning up
the contamination from the accident, and, in fact, that no technology exists
for cleaning up that mess. This is what happened at Chernobyl and is occurring
today at Fukashima Daichi.
The sixth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that there would be no nuclear power
industry at all if it were not for a law that limits the financial liability of
the owners and operators of the plants. This is the “Price-Anderson Nuclear
Indemnity Act.”
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
Without this guarantee,
no investor would put his or her money into nuclear power. If nuclear power
were as safe as is claimed by its proponents, the Price-Anderson Act would not
be necessary. We, the public, are subsidizing an industry that threatens us
all.
The seventh reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that the time frame during which the
products of nuclear plants, and the components of those plants, will be fatal
to exposure to human beings, is longer than humans have had written language.
We are talking tens of thousands of years. There is no way that any human
being, corporation, or government can provide any assurance that a nuclear
plant or its by-products will be kept away from humans so far in the future.
An eighth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that its safety depends on proper
maintenance of every plant in existence. Nuclear power plants are very complex
and rapidly aging machines, many of which were built in the 1960s or 1970s with
an anticipated life span of 40 years. Regulatory agencies, after giving the
public assurances that they would only be there for 40 years, regularly extend
the operating permits for those old plants. Almost all of them are at or over
their designed life expectancy.
There is ample evidence
that essential maintenance does not occur. Florida Power and Light’s Turkey
Point nuclear plant was reported to have inoperative gauges and controls in its
control room. Are we to assume that the gauges and controls, that are now
inoperative, were put there when the plant was constructed just to look cute?
There is even evidence that disgruntled workers inside the plant have committed
sabotage of nuclear plants. One such FPL employee allegedly drilled a hole in a
cooling pipe at Turkey Point, causing the entire plant to have to be shut down.
Even without employee sabotage, machines fail. Radiation is known to cause changes
in the metal of containment vessels, which can cause the affected parts to
fail, if not found and replaced in time.
A ninth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that maintenance of the plants
exposes workers to huge amounts of radiation. Those workers are often temporary
hires, for a job that requires only a short exposure to very high radiation
high levels, during which they get a “lifetime” dose of radiation. Those
workers are paid very well and then they are released. “Terminated,” as it
were. There is reason to believe that some of these highly irradiated workers
move from nuclear plant to nuclear plant, performing similar jobs, and
repeatedly getting the maximum exposure to radiation that any worker is
supposed to receive in a lifetime. The last I heard, there was no system in
place to insure that these glow-in-the-dark workers were not being overexposed
to radiation, or to track them in any way to identify whether they were
adversely impacted by their exposure or suffered later health effects.
And a tenth reason why
nuclear power cannot be considered safe is that operating nuclear plants are
constantly releasing radioactive materials in to the air around the plant and
into the cooling water used by the plant. Two of FPL’s nuclear plants, St.
Lucie Units 1 and 2, are upwind of the farming area north of Lake Okeechobee
where most of Florida’s dairy products are produced. The radioactive elements
that occur in airborne releases are expected to settle out in the grazing
pastures for dairy cows, where grass containing those elements will ultimately
go into milk consumed by babies throughout Florida. Growing children hungrily
incorporate minerals from milk into growing bones and organs. When those
minerals are radioactive, they cause increased exposure to radioactivity for
those children. Have there been any studies of children in South Florida to
determine whether their exposure to increased radiation in milk has caused an
increase in childhood cancers? None that I’m aware of.
Of particular interest
are Iodine 131 and Cesium 137. Iodine is taken up in the thyroid and
Cesium is incorporated into bones. Cesium 137 has a half-life of 30 years. That
means in 30 years any sample will only be half as radioactive as it is today,
because half of it will have changed to more-stable Barium 137. Iodine 131 has
a shorter half-life, but that only means it will emit more radiation over a
given time. It is associated with increased rates of thyroid cancer.
In Japan, there is great
concern because fish being caught offshore are now exhibiting 4,000% of the
normal level of Cesium 137 and 447% of the normal level of Iodine 131. See: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fukushima--One-Of-The-Gre-by-Allen-L-Roland-110418-95.html
Here is an article from
the Evansville Courier-Press. It is about Pripyat, a town near Chernobyl, but
as you read it, imagine it is about your town, just down the road from your
local nuclear reactor, after the accident. http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/apr/10/chernobyl-may-teach-grim-lesson-to-japan/
If you care about this
land, and our nation, and our planet, as I do, then you may be able to
understand why I am not willing to risk our welfare, or that of those who come
after us, to the dangers of nuclear power. Particularly, when there are
clean, safe, renewable alternatives that do not have the risks associated with
nuclear power.
As always, I encourage
you to check out the facts for yourself, and then draw your own conclusions.
Let me know if you come to a different conclusion than I have.
One place to find more
information on the dangers of nuclear power is the Union of Concerned
Scientists. Their web site is located at http://www.ucsusa.org/
.
April 18, 2011
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