World Nuclear Association Blog

by Ted Rockwell

In 1897, House Bill 246 proposed that the Indiana Legislature change the value of Pi to 3.0:
"A bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever  on the same…And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as unsolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend."  Luckily, the bill failed in the Senate, and never became law.  A science/legal quagmire was avoided.

Yucca Mountain, the purported “solution to the nuclear waste problem” has been subjected to similar actions to define nature arbitrarily, but has not succeeded in repelling them.  It now faces laws requiring answers to unanswerable questions with little connection to reality.  Let me explain.

The term “nuclear waste” is a misnomer.  The material in question has several components:  fissile nuclear fuel awaiting recycle; fertile uranium that can be converted to fuel in “breeder reactors”; billions of dollars worth of fission products, including “rare earths,” that will probably be recoverable; and a small amount of residual material with no further use.  The residual waste will remain within the ceramic fuel structure or be melted into a glass.  It cannot be harmful unless it’s removed from its sealed container.  The residual waste can be safely stored in an appropriate warehouse structure.  Maybe we should put up some OSHA warning posters: DO NOT EAT THE GLASS!

Let’s look at the “nuclear waste problem” – not as defined by lawyers or computer modelers, but by its effects on people and the environment.  What's the problem?  Anti-nuclear activist, Sheldon Novick (“The Electric War”), wrote that nuclear waste is no more dangerous than many other industrial wastes we handle routinely – and that’s if we let it loose, which we don’t.

Over the past half century, has “nuclear waste” ever had any deleterious effects on people or the environment?  The answer is simply NO.  When removed from the reactor, the used fuel is placed for several years in large open pools until 99+% of the radioactivity is decayed away.  Then it is stored in robust stainless containers on the plant sites, and many utilities invite visitors to touch the containers, measure the radiation, and satisfy themselves that they are harmless.  And they are of no interest to terrorists.
 
The scientific issue is simple and straightforward.  But implementing it has become a nightmare.  To make the problem go away, decades ago, plant owners calculated that the ultimate safety solution, the Yucca Mountain concept, could be paid for through a minimal surtax on the sale of electricity, and they “solved the waste problem” that way. 

But it didn’t end there.  Contradictory court rulings, state laws, and declarations by U.S. Presidents and by the National Academy of Sciences became entangled.  “Defining the requirements for Yucca Mountain” became a lucrative game and attracted lots of players.  But in fact, after a few hundred years, the radioactivity becomes comparable to some harmless, natural materials.  “But let’s be conservative.  Call it 1000 years…make it 10,000”  And somewhere between the Academies and the courts, it got to be a million years.  Will the cure for cancer still be a problem a million years from now?  Will the human race even exist then?  Will the YM site be under water?  Or in an active volcano field?  Where will the leakage paths to the water-table be?  No mortal can answer such questions.

We have a choice.  Lawyers and politicians could take years, trying to restore YM to its former place.  But if they succeed, we will have converted a non-problem into an unworkable situation.  We must not go that way.  People made this situation; people can unmake it.  Any law or rule can be amended.  President Obama correctly stated that used fuel can stay where it is for decades more, without posing any significant hazard.  Whatever his motive for doing so, Obama’s action presents us with a logical occasion to re-define the issue in light of current realities, and proceed to solve it sensibly.

If we are willing to accept mercury into our homes in fragile glass fluorescent light-bulbs, and use various metal poisons in solar panels, both of which maintain full toxicity forever, why should radioactive materials that get less and less toxic each day be fearful for a million years?

There is no call to reduce nuclear safety.  The law and commonsense both require that all realistic safety questions associated with radioactive material be fully explored and dealt with.  But the current Yucca Mountain specifications do not facilitate that process.

WNA is pleased to publish its first guest blog by Dr. Theodore "Ted" Rockwell, who has more than sixty years of experience in nuclear technologies  

Dr. Rockwell is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society and recipient of its first Lifetime Contribution Award, now known as the Rockwell Award. He has Distinguished Service Medals from both the Navy and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was Technical Director of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s program to build the nuclear Navy and the first commercial atomic power station. He has several patents, including one listed in “a selection of [27] landmark US atomic energy patents from all the patents issued to date.” His works have been published in German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He is the first Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering.

He has written numerous books and technical papers, including the widely-used text, Reactor Shielding Design Manual; The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference; and Creating the New World: Stories & Images from the Dawn of the Atomic Age. He co-authored The Shippingport Pressurized Water Reactor, and Arms Control Agreements: Designs for Verification. 

by Ted Rockwell 

I’ve found it’s generally more productive to discuss a person’s factual assumptions than to argue about conclusions or proposed actions based on those assumptions. To that end, I’d like to suggest a few cases where common assumptions used to support anti-nuclear positions are demonstrably false or illogical. Documentation is available on request. I invite you to carry the discussion further. I’ll state the claim below in boldface, followed by a brief rebuttal. 

1. Nuclear technology is unfamiliar and untested. We should proceed slowly until we get more experience.  

Full-scale nuclear power plants have been operating with unprecedented safety and reliability since 1953 – a typical human lifespan, two generations – without a single resulting radiological death to the public in the western world. And this includes operation in active-duty naval vessels and in commercial installations in a wide variety of national and societal situations. No other low-carbon energy source has come near this performance, despite decades of subsidized effort. 

2. Nuclear technology is not renewable.  

There is enough uranium to run for thousands of years in once-through mode. Less that 1% of uranium is fissile. But in the process of generating electricity, some of the non-fissile uranium absorbs a neutron and converts to fuel. Moreover, there are reactors designed to “breed” more fuel than they burn. In addition, the oceans contain enough uranium to outlast the estimated needs of humanity. This is qualitatively different from non-nuclear fuels that require millions of times greater quantities of fuel for the same energy output . 

3. A nuclear reactor can cause an accident that overwhelms the resources of all the world’s insurance companies. Why should humanity take such a risk?  

That potentiality is stated as a premise – not a fact – in the U.S. Price-Anderson liability act. But an international, decades-long investigation to determine the worst physically achievable event involving American commercial nuclear power plants, or their equivalent elsewhere, concluded that few if any deaths off-site would be expected. These studies placed no limitations on personnel or equipment malperformance. They assumed fuel melting occurred, and that containment integrity was severely compromised. The results were published in the peer-reviewed, mainstream journal Science, and have not been seriously challenged. 

4. What about Three Mile Island?  

The partial meltdown at TMI was a case in point. No significant radioactive release occurred. Measurements inside the containment showed that the steam/water/air cyclone during the incident had reduced the important fission-product level by several orders of magnitude. The extensive TMI data are incorporated in the Science paper conclusions.  

5. What about Chernobyl?  

Talking just from the American perspective, no one is suggesting that more Chernobyl reactors be built. It was a flawed design, originally for weapons production, built and operated without adequate safety considerations. The Chernobyl design uses graphite as a moderator, to slow down the neutrons so they have a greater chance of causing fission. It is actually over-moderated. So the cooling water, which has more parasitic neutron absorption than graphite, tends to poison, or shut down the reactor. Therefore, if the water heats up, and becomes less dense, there is less poison, and the water heats up further, which tends to run away and has to be controlled by pushing in control rods. But the control rods displace water, and have to overcome that effect. Reactors without graphite, that use the cooling water for moderation, are designed to be under-moderated, and thus water temperature becomes a stabilizing effect, rather than destabilizing.

Moreover, the Chernobyl safety circuits had been deliberately disabled by operators for an impromptu “test.” And there was inadequate supervision of operator training and decision-making. The commercial water-cooled reactors we’ve built and planned could not under undergo the type of casualty that occurred at Chernobyl. I do not claim that all kinds of reactors are safe. Chernobyl was not. And I do not claim there will be no mishaps or malfunctions. But the American safety criteria do provide that the kinds of events physically possible will have limited and tolerable consequences.

The Chernobyl reactor was a dumb and dangerous design. Many Russian scientists understood this and expressed concern. But the designer was a pet of the Kremlin, and got his way.

6. “Nuclear Waste” poses an unprecedented hazard, because it stays toxic for thousands of years. 

This perverts the fact that radioactivity’s unusual characteristic is that it gets less toxic every day, unlike mercury, lead, arsenic, etc., that maintain full toxic strength forever. “Nuclear waste” will be recycled to produce more electricity. The residual waste is no more hazardous than other industrial wastes we handle in billions of times greater quantity.

7. But we’re fouling our nest – building up more and more radioactivity. 

The fact is, we don’t create enough new radioactivity to offset the natural decay of the earth’s background radioactivity. The earth’s total radioactivity is relentlessly decreasing, day by day.

8. Radiation and radioactivity are particularly harmful and require stricter protection. 

There is no factual basis for this belief. Radiation is just one of many hazards our bodies face. It’s not mysterious; it’s been studied more than most potential hazards. All of us are continually exposed to radiation, so there is plenty of data. 

9. Human-made radiation is more dangerous than “natural.” 

Since neither instruments nor organisms can tell the difference, this notion has no factual basis. (Nevertheless, radiation protection rules require minimizing this trivial fraction of our normal daily radiation dose.)

10. There is no safe dose of radiation. One gamma ray can kill you. 

There is no scientific basis for this belief. In fact, some amount of radiation is necessary to support life. This model was adapted for administrative simplicity, and eventually took on a life of its own. (I never understood the claim of simplicity; virtually all other hazards operate on a simple “permissible level” basis.)

If you want to argue about any of this, I’ll welcome your feedback. But let’s not argue about the conclusions or the rationale; let’s talk about the facts.

To contact me please visist my own Learning About Energy website
 

MIT recently released a new report called "The Future of Natural Gas". The study  concludes that natural gas will play a leading role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over the next several decades, largely by replacing older, inefficient coal plants with highly efficient combined-cycle gas generation.

But that conclusion is based on only achieving a 50% GHG cut by 2050. According to their own report (page xiii) "A more stringent CO2 reduction of, for example, 80%, would probably require the complete de-carbonization of the power sector."

A 50% cut in emissions by 2050 is a lot less than is being talked about as necessary to effectively tackle climate change. And a switch from coal to gas is a one-off saving. Gas power plants emit about half the emissions that coal plants do. So switching from coal to gas gives you a 50% reduction. But you are still left using a very substantially emitting greenhouse gas polluter. To make the further emission reductions necessary you would need to switch again from gas to truly low carbon sources.

In recent years one reason given for opposing electricity generation from nuclear power is to say that "nuclear can't contribute to a low carbon economy because if you decide to build nuclear reactors today it will be too late and too little to make a difference. We need to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions this decade and new nuclear power stations won't come on line until the 2020s." 

This argument simply does not stand up to scrutiny.  

For a start, to suggest that any contribution from nuclear energy to combating global warming will come too late ignores the plain fact of its significant contribution today. Already around 15% of the world's electricity is supplied by nuclear power, avoiding the emission of more than two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. New renewables (wind, solar, biomass, as opposed to large hydro) generate only around a quarter of that amount of electricity, although certainly that is no reason to suggest we shouldn't be expanding the use of these low carbon electricity sources too.

It is true to say that if a government makes a policy decision today to support new nuclear build then it may take a decade to turn that commitment into a practical response of operational nuclear power plants.  

It is also true that to effectively tackle climate change and meet our needs for secure supplies of low carbon electricity we need to be bringing in new generation capacity this decade. But it is wrong to think investment in new nuclear capacity is beginning today from a standing start. There are currently over fifty nuclear reactors with a capacity of just under 50,000 MWe under construction. These reactors will collectively avoid the emission of an additional 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. These reactors are coming online throughout this decade, some will start this year. (See our Reactor Database for where these are being built). Still more are already in the planning stage with construction due to start soon. In China alone there are plans to increase nuclear generation capacity sixfold to 60,000 MWe by 2020. 

So nuclear energy is already making a major global contribution to providing secure and affordable electricity supplies of electricity today and many new nuclear power plants will add to that contribtion over the next few years.  

But even if we were to put aside this immediate contribution from nuclear power is it right to say that the time taken to build new nuclear power plants mean they are irrelevant to the purpose of fighting climate change, just because greenhouse gas emission growth needs to be halted in the next few years?

Again the answer is a clear 'no'. We live in a world starved of electricity. Only a small, fortunate minority of the global population benefits from a reliable supply of electricity. The fast-growing economies of major developing countries such as India and China are driving an increasing global demand for electricity. The world's population is expected to grow from just under 7 billion at present to 9 billion by 2050.

Even if developed countries can stabilise or reduce their electricity demand through increased energy efficiency the growing need of  the rest of the world driven by economic growth and increased population will mean conventional electricity demand is likely to rise to three or four times the current level over the next 40 years.

Shifting from today's world of electricity poverty to one where we meet the needs of all will take decades.Yes, it can take time to bring new nuclear power plants online and that means that we need to now make a commitment to nuclear energy as part of a clean energy future.. But it is ridiculous to say that nuclear power isn't part of the long term solution to climate change because new plants can't come on stream until 2020. The majority of electricity generation capacity required in 2050 won't be needed in 2020.  Nuclear energy is part of the solution today, new nuclear power plants already under construction will be starting up throughout this decade and nuclear energy can be a major component in meeting our long-term global electricity needs.

The Guardian reports that the UK has reached 1GWe of low carbon offshore wind generation capacity. That the UK is leading the world in terms of offshore wind capacity while at the same time as starting on a process of new nuclear build is just one example of how countries can support a portfolio of clean energy technologies, rather than trading one off against the other.

The Guardian article gives another example when it identifies Finland as the country in Europe with the shortest time taken to approve new wind turbine projects, taking just eight months, compared to 24 months in the  UK  and 50 months in  Spain. Finland  has also just announced plans for new nuclear build.

The Guardian article says that 1GWe of offshore wind capacity will produce enough electricity to supply 700,000 homes. Exactly what that means isn't clear, but based on average UK electricity consumption per household it suggests 1GWe of offshore wind turbines will generate about 2.5 TWh of electricity. In comparison 1GWe of nuclear generation would generate three times that amount, the difference coming from the more intermittant and variable nature of wind power.