The Curse of Nuclear Energy
The Curse of Nuclear Energy
The abject failure of the industry and of governments, to provide nuclear power in a safe, efficient, clean or sustainable manner.
The Curse of Nuclear Energy
Benjamin Trayne
We still employ an ancient technology of generating steam with heat to crank turbines and then generators, now using processed, enriched radioactive compounds found here on the earth, create mountains of dangerous radioactive waste that after seven decades we still don’t know how to handle, endanger huge sectors of human population with a well-proven high probability of nuclear accidents, and at the very same time, tout our accomplishments.
What a magnificent species we are.
Fully expressing just how bad this really is would not be possible in a single article. It should be possible, however, to generate a new picture in the minds of every living soul; If humanity has a carbon footprint, then it also has a radioactive waste superhighway.
Waste disposal. What form has it taken?
This writing began as, in part, an intended exposé of failed waste disposal efforts for nuclear power generation, but I’ve come across a prime example of government handling and its magnanimous degree of concern for people, and for our shared environment. Just so happens, it predates all commercial nuclear power generation.
Here is a photo, taken in Washington state, near the Hanford reactor complex.
Here is a link. readthedirt.org
From that article: (license here: Creative Commons license)
“Gerry Pollet is Executive Director of Heart of America Northwest, a 16,000 member citizens’ group which is widely respected as the region’s largest citizens’ watchdog group for the cleanup of America’s most contaminated area: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, through which the Columbia River flows for fifty miles in Central Washington.
Enough Plutonium to make more than 125 nuclear weapons is in the ground at Hanford. At Hanford, the Columbia River flows past ten reactor sites and thousands of contaminated soil sites for fifty miles before the River flows down the Columbia Gorge and past Portland. Located in Washington’s Tri-Cities region, Hanford consists of nine Plutonium production reactors, which are shut, and one operating commercial reactor.
Hanford was created during WW II as part of the Manhattan Project. Its place in the Project was to provide a location to build the first, and totally untested, full scale nuclear reactor. The Army sought a location with lots of cooling water (the Columbia River), isolation, and available electrical power (from the Grand Coulee dam). The Plutonium for the first Atomic Bomb – the Trinity test in New Mexico – and for the Nagasaki bomb was extracted from reactor fuel removed from that first reactor. To extract Plutonium required melting down the fuel rods in acid and chemically extracting tiny amounts of Plutonium (from the rods) while leaving massive quantities of liquid High Level Nuclear Wastes behind.
Over a million gallons of the most deadly chemical and radioactive waste created on the planet, liquid High Level Nuclear Wastes, have leaked from massive underground tanks and are moving far more rapidly to groundwater and the Columbia River than the federal Energy Department (USDOE), which runs Hanford, claimed was possible, until recently. Indeed, they insist now that the waste won’t move as far as monitoring shows it already has.
Rather than clean-up, USDOE’s plans are best described as “cover-up”. USDOE proposes to leave all these wastes in the ground—while proposing to add even more waste to Hanford by using Hanford (again) as a national radioactive waste dump. USDOE is now proposing to use Hanford to bury extremely radioactive waste from other nuclear weapons plants and from decommissioning nuclear reactors, in addition to a prior decision to bury 17,000 truckloads of radioactive and chemically mixed wastes from the nuclear weapons complex.”
More reading on this topic can be found on Wikipedia under the subheading, “cleanup activities:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Admittedly, the cleanup activities that have been carried out and that are continuously in-process, although grossly inadequate, have definitely been extremely expensive. The same is true of everything related to the deeply problematic nuclear industry.
wikimedia.org United States Department of Energy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Do you think, maybe, the Hanford mess was a one-off?
From an open access article, The Interdependence of Autonomous Human-Machine Teams: The Entropy of Teams, But Not Individuals, Advances Science by W.F. Lawless
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/12/1195
“An example of one of the inferior waste management practices by the U.S. Department of Energy prior to 1985 associated with the widespread dispersal of radioactive waste contamination on and off the Savannah River Site, SC; similar mismanagement practices occurred at Hanford, WA. Reflective of this photo, 95% of all of Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) solid military radioactive wastes were disposed in open soil pits inside of cardboard boxes; they often sat in the pits uncovered for months at a time during all weather conditions (public photo by DOE).”
Author’s note: The Savannah River site was supposed to be for low-level waste only. NONE of it was supposed to be directly buried in soil pits in cardboard boxes. Feel safe?
The reality is, a 1982 act of Congress, amended in 1987, tasked the U.S. government with siting and disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear facilities. Since President Obama cut funding for the Yucca Mountain project in 2012, no other site has been identified.
How long will the materials stored in some as-yet-undetermined, lucky state remain radioactive?
The educated guesses appear to run from a minimum of 250,000 years to about one million years. Obviously, even the site currently in use in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) outside Carlsbad, falls far short. Built to contain high-level wastes from constructing the United States nuclear arsenal, the massive facility there is designed to last for “in excess of 10,000 years.” It isn’t containing it, right now.
DoE photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Nuclear scientists seem to be in general agreement that deep geological interment of nuclear waste is the best, if not the only solution, adequate or not. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s stated requirements for a burial site include low groundwater content, stable for at least tens of thousands of years and geologically stable over millions of years. One wonders how projections of future stability for the next million, will be made. My guess is, there won’t be any.
So, where is all of this nuclear waste being stored right now, since it has now exceeded 90,000 tons in the USA alone? Why, nearly all of it remains right where produced, at each and every generation site in the U.S., whether shut down or operating. The United States government, by its own inaction, has no place to go with it, and eventually pays, after being sued for expenses, for round-the-clock federally-required guarding of it from potential terrorist attacks. So you may not see that cost reflected in your electric bill, but you’re paying for it, nevertheless.
“All told, the country’s many abandoned nuclear (power generation) facilities — including Maine Yankee — have cost the federal government billions of dollars, a sum that increases by about $2 million each day, according to Eric Howes, the spokesperson for Maine Yankee and two other decommissioned plants in New England.” www.mainepublic.org
From a 2017 article: “The waste now awaiting permanent storage at 121 (U.S.) sites has mounted to 79,000 tons — 9,000 tons above the planned limit for Yucca Mountain. Currently, the country’s sole permanent storage facility is New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which takes only defense-generated nuclear waste. It recently reopened after a fire and an unrelated radiological release led it to shut down in 2014.” hcn.org
Of course that figure has been revised upward in 2023.
But, obfuscation is the name of the game, making the horrid seem “okay.”
(Did you know, if you use material or quote text from a website that may do the website owners financial harm, they can sue you for damages? That’s why I can’t publish examples of that obfuscation, but, they candy-coat it, claim that all of the waste ever produced would fit nicely onto a single football field, like, thirty feet deep, or something. Not only would that be grossly untrue, but it assumes that all of the low-level and mid-level waste stored right along with the high-level waste could somehow be separated and not counted. Which it certainly cannot. So, congratulations on the censorship of your own false claims, people. For the reader, where in any of the photographs you will see of radioactive waste storage drums will you see “high,” “medium” or “low” stenciled onto it?)
Meanwhile, I’m truly wondering how and why this topic came up; “Spent Fuel Fires Associated with Decommissioning” - Please note, if you visit this page, the bullet-point “Potential for re-criticality.” Really?
Does anyone actually believe the public has been made aware of every nuclear incident that has happened? That’s the tricky thing, you see. We never know if radiation is present until it’s far too late. You can’t see it, feel it or smell it. When the core of Three Mile Island Unit 2 melted, the first indicator of it came from Albany, New York, where a radioactive cloud was detected, 375 kilometers to its north, before the incident came to light or hit the news. If they don’t tell us and it’s kept under the radar, the first indicator may well be an unexplained cancer. Hint: No one will own up to being the cause of your death.
To make matters worse, today, forty-four years after the core meltdown at Three Mile Island, “According to NBC News, the contаinment building for Unit 2 is still ‘highly rаdioаctive.’”
Balance that with your current overall trust of government, the power producers and the almighty profit motive.
But so far I’ve only mentioned one major nuclear accident. How does this picture look, worldwide? Can you imagine, ninety-nine (at least) accidents, through 2009?
And there are others, one of which I have some personal knowledge. But don’t take my word for it, visit the Wikipedia link above. Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russian Federation, South Korea, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and of course the United States. It does appear that the greater the density of facilities, the greater the number of accidents occur.
The “advanced” “small” reactor effort is the most recent attempt at expansion of nuclear power. The new, “pebble-bed” ceramic-coated fissile materials are added as needed while expended fuel is more easily removed. There is no coolant water, and if available power goes down these units are considered stable enough to “not go critical.” This means, of course, that we can have a great many more nuclear reactors, even closer to populated areas for which they provide power. Not that TMI wasn’t close, in fact, it was brilliantly sited on an island in the middle of a river so that if it had melted its way through containment, the water table would have been as high as it could be, for that feared “China syndrome.” But I digress.
My point is, untested, unproven technology placed near populations is just basically stupid, which means to me, those who have been making policy are not exactly worthy of the public trust. The news that was on the airwaves during the Three Mile Island event stated that if the reactor had dropped though containment and had hit the water table, it would have rendered an area within a 100-mile radius, uninhabitable. This would have included the city of Philadelphia. If it had made Philadelphia uninhabitable, do you think Washington D.C. might have been affected, as well?
Data I have seen suggest that there will likely be more than three hundred of these small advanced reactors deployed worldwide between now and 2050. The Union of Concerned Scientists seems to disagree with the excitement, saying the advanced designs are not likely to be safer than today’s nuclear plants. So why, one might ask, would anyone go to the trouble to develop such a thing? Gee I don’t know, you don’t suppose it might be the money?
If you don’t feel like clicking on that link, the Department of Energy has already dispensed $160 million in “first awards.” And my own two cents, these pebble-bed reactors operate at more than twice the temperature of current conventional nuclear power generating reactors, 900 C. This means to me that if they’ve misjudged in any way and one does melt through containment, there can be far more radioactive steam blasted higher and further than the one that failed at Three Mile Island, would have ever done.
Those with the expertise have borne out some of my concerns, even in terms of increased radioactive waste, on this fantastic page. Please have a look.
In fact, smaller reactors are by no means a new idea, and that in fact is where some of my personal experience comes in. It is an unrecorded, unreported event, apparently; even the local newspaper articles don’t bear it out, but the residents know.
Twenty miles south of the city of Altoona, PA, near the village of Saxton, this nuclear reactor was sited, in 1961:
Photographer unknown. Published by Atomic Energy Commission, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It was one of the earlier collaborative projects between government and industry and was considered an experimental reactor, used for training of operators and for fuel testing. At some point between 1965 and its “decommissioning” in 1972, something happened that stopped it immediately, we’ll never know just what. What I do know is that the Atomic Energy Commission, the regulatory agency at the time, frequented farms in the nearby area known locally as Morrison’s Cove, taking milk samples at each of the dairy farms with regularity for some months, advising farmers that they needed to check for radioactivity in the milk. Morrison’s Cove includes the small town of New Enterprise, PA and is just over the ridge known as Fredericksburg Mountain from the Saxton plant site. It seems, the plant’s operators knew which way the wind was blowing.
I am aware, too, that many residents of Morrison’s Cove have succumbed to cancers of various types. Said one farmer, a resident of Morrison’s Cove who I knew, “If you have enough money, you can do whatever you want.” And isn’t that the truth.
Today the site has been cleared and razed. Who knows where the reactor core, the fuel, or the balance of the facility is now? Is it right there beneath the surface, buried in loose soil in South Carolina, added to the Hanford site in Washington state, or maybe in some undisclosed location nearer your front door?
I have personal knowledge, too, of mishandling of some low-level waste by burning, but I can’t relate it because I can’t prove it. The assertion that “radioactive waste handling is confined to authorized, trained individuals,” is purely bunk.
In all the world, there is but one actively-developed underground repository for “permanent” interment of radioactive waste, and it’s in Finland. Finland isn’t even in the top 15 countries with the highest production. That site is due to open soon, and there is no possibility it could store the entire world’s nuclear leavings, even if it was so inclined. I feel completely safe in asserting, it will not.
Worldwide, generation of nuclear waste is estimated at more than a quarter million metric tons, with 90,000 of that in the US alone. But that much data simply does not fit within such a small nutshell. This fantastic website prevents a clearer view, centric to Europe and published in 2019: World_Nuclear_Waste_Report_2019_Focus_Europe.pdf
According to this, which cites many sources, nuclear power generation is not the only source of waste, by far. The European naval fleet is a producer, also; “lack of country-specific decommissioning experience also leads to generally underestimated decommissioning costs. Nuclear power plants were built with operation in mind, and until now, most plants currently in the decommissioning process or entering it were built at a time when the idea of decommissioning was not yet fully conceptualized. As a result, countries have to approach decommissioning using trial-and-error methods.”
As further proof of the poor judgment of leaders within the nuclear industries, ocean disposal was carried out by thirteen countries, until 1993 when the practice was internationally outlawed. The sea floor is littered with it, then.
In 2021, France had the highest nuclear power production of their total needs, at 69%, but they also have a reputation for sending their waste, um, elsewhere. The Siberia “reprocessing” version of the story didn’t come up until a significant period after the shipments had come to light, published by Greenpeace.
Clearly, proper, safe handling and “storage” of nuclear wastes is a very large, and very rapidly growing problem. In the United States, the world’s leading producer of electricity by nuclear means, why has this not been solved? Here’s why; “the buck” has not “stopped” anywhere, for a very long time.
Nuclear power plants were not designed, or sited with meltdowns, tsunamis, tectonics or human error in mind. That’s why they call them “accidents.” And what do you do following an accident? Well, sometimes caution is thrown to the wind, and water, to carry it wherever it may. Consider the recent dumping from Fukushima, directly into the ocean.
“Workers at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station work among underground water storage pools on 17 April 2013. Two types of above-ground storage tanks rise in the background.” Photo from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official Flickr account, edited from original. Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA. Image license: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
The balance of these photos are from all over the world:
WASTE WATER CONTAINING RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS IS ALLOWED TO SETTLE AT UNION CARBIDE URANIUM MILL - NARA - 543644.jpg National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commonspicture: Dr. János Korom licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
Morsleben, Germany
Chernobyl
Fukushima – 30 million bags of debris
I could include thousands upon thousands more photos, of accidents, piled and damaged and mishandled nuclear wastes, compose story after true story of mishandled funds, lost opportunities and then on into the human tragedies surrounding uranium mining, processing and the leftover tailings, emitting radon gas directly into the air. And what, really, would be the point? Because it’s money, it has always been money, and the accumulation of power over others. Had not the nuclear age come upon us we would have devised other means of generating the energy we need. We could easily do that now. But every indication is that we will not.
Just looking down over the headlines on the web, I see:
“Nuclear power can play a big role in the energy transition…” - weforum.org
"WEF Davos: Can nuclear energy play a role in combating the climate crisis?”
- cnbc.com
“White House requests Ukraine nuclear security funding to expand …”
- cnn.com
“Australia Says Coal to Nuclear Switch Would Cost $249 Billion”
- bloomberg.com
“Americans' Support for Nuclear Energy Highest in a Decade” - gallup.com
And on and on it goes. “But we need nuclear energy!” No, we don’t. Multinational corporations want the money, period.
And your governments are going to get it for them.
Unless we say no.
Literally at our fingertips and within easy reach, is access to the greatest source of sustainable, magnificently-controlled fusion energy for which any species could ever ask. Our own star radiates totally unimaginable thermonuclear output, and far more energy reaches our Earth each day than we could ever use. Petawatts of energy accumulate between the upper and lower atmosphere, beneath its tremendous power. Enormous amounts radiate to the surfaces of deserts, move great air masses, drive our ocean currents and nourish our verdant global biosphere. The temperature differences over the North American Great Plains generate and unleash monstrous tornadoes and elsewhere, massive, destructive hurricanes.
In a coming piece I will detail some of the largely-overlooked ways in which this energy could and must, eventually, be harnessed, and without killing birds, whales or anything else. Unfortunately, it is not our inability to do this, but our willingness to follow the leads of others, those who would profit by their short-sighted, government-funded or subsidized projects. In other words; It’s the money. Is that a surprise?
No one should have to convince anyone these days, many things are broken. Our political system is broken, our economic models are all broken, the monetary and banking systems are broken, education and research partnerships are broken, and it can easily be shown, education itself is broken. “Shattered” even comes to mind.
Among humans, politicking and brazen censorship rule the day. Seekers of power and control over the common man are destroying the world as it has been, and soon, if it is not stopped, will destroy any hope of freedoms and a reasonable future, for all of mankind.
The worst and the most critical of these have been brought to you by the nuclear age. It should never have been, any of it, with the obvious benefit of clearer hindsight. Willful destruction of our host planet is endemic to humanity, that much is obvious to just about everyone.
Such is the curse of nuclear energy.
Perhaps we can’t make this a lot better, but we certainly could stop making it worse.
hcn.org -
https://www.hcn.org/articles/is-yucca-mountain-back-from-the-dead#:~:text=The Department of Energy estimated,a national nuclear waste repository.