As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror--radioactive fallout--some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.
An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an un-wise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90% of melt-downs. The U.S. has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.
Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had 8-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after 4 hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen.
Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site--so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest.
Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted." Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island's containment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident's hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.
Regulators haven't resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many Presidents' nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.
Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 2005 estimate of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.
Fukushima I-4's spent fuel alone, while in the reactor, had produced (over years, not in an instant) more than a hundred times more fission energy and hence radioactivity than both 1945 atomic bombs. If that already-damaged fuel keeps overheating, it may melt or burn, releasing into the air things like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which take several centuries to decay a millionfold. Unit 3's fuel is spiked with plutonium, which takes 482,000 years.
Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.
Here's how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"), and renewable energy. The last two made 18% of the world's 2009 electricity, nuclear 13%, reversing their 2000 shares--and made over 90% of the world's additional electricity in 2008.
Those smarter choices are sweeping the global energy market. Half the world's new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable. In 2010, renewables except big hydro dams won $151 billion of private investment and added over 50 billion watts (70% the total capacity of all 23 Fukushima-style U.S. reactors) while nuclear got zero private investment and kept losing capacity. Supposedly unreliable windpower made 43-52% of four German states' total 2010 electricity. Non-nuclear Denmark, 21% wind-powered, plans to get entirely off fossil fuels. Hawai'i plans 70% renewables by 2025.
In contrast, of the 66 nuclear units worldwide officially listed as "under construction" at the end of 2010, 12 had been so listed for over 20 years, 45 had no official startup date, half were late, all 66 were in centrally planned power systems--50 of those in just four (China, India, Russia, South Korea)--and zero were free-market purchases. Since 2007, nuclear growth has added less annual output than just the costliest renewable--solar power --and will probably never catch up. While inherently safe renewable competitors are walloping both nuclear and coal plants in the marketplace and keep getting dramatically cheaper, nuclear costs keep soaring, and with greater safety precautions would go even higher. Tokyo Electric Co., just recovering from $10-20 billion in 2007 earthquake costs at its other big nuclear complex, now faces an even more ruinous Fukushima bill.
Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100+% subsidized--yet they couldn't raise a cent of private capital, because they have no business case. They cost 2-3 times as much as new windpower, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn't even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over--leaving ample room to replace nuclear power's half-as-big-as-coal contribution too--but we need to do it just once. Yet the nuclear industry demands ever more lavish subsidies, and its lobbyists hold all other energy efforts hostage for tens of billions in added ransom, with no limit.
Japan, for its size, is even richer than America in benign, ample, but long-neglected energy choices. Perhaps this tragedy will call Japan to global leadership into a post-nuclear world. And before America suffers its own Fukushima, it too should ask, not whether unfinanceably costly new reactors are safe, but why build any more, and why keep running unsafe ones. China has suspended reactor approvals. Germany just shut down the oldest 41% of its nuclear capacity for study. America's nuclear lobby says it can't happen here, so pile on lavish new subsidies.
A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before--dead of an incurable attack of market forces. No doubt when nuclear power's collapse in the global marketplace, already years old, is finally acknowledged, it will be blamed on Fukushima. While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people's sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future.
Physicist Amory Lovins consults on energy to business and government leaders worldwide. He's written 31 books and over 450 papers, and received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Zayed, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 11 honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards. He's an honorary U.S. architect, a Swedish engineering academician, and a former Oxford don, and has taught at nine universities, most recently Stanford. His RMI team's autumn 2011 book Reinventing Fire describes business-led pathways for a vibrant U.S. economy that by 2050 needs no oil, coal, or nuclear power to provide clean and resilient energy with superior economics.
Copyright © Rocky Mountain Institute 2011
“OK greens make up your minds. Do we have NUC's or coal and natural gas until any viable alternative becomes available. Wind is not the answer and one side of the green movement usually ends up fighting it? Solar is great on my roof as a way to lower my energy use off the grid but again parts of the green movement will not allow large solar plants to be built (GOOD). I read a thing about wave energy but see the same NIMBY issue with it that comes up every time someone wants to build something near the Kennedy compound or in CA. I'm all for being a good stewart of the planet but I'm not moving into a cave and living in the dark until everybody from the green movement does it first. We are waiting! Actually when you move into your caves we will be able to make logical descisions about energy without all the emotional GIA worshiper crap we must now endure!”
• New production of carbon fiber vehicles (cars, trucks, planes, trains) triple and quadruple mileage thereby allow us to get out of middle east wars
• Mega-business growth in retrofitting commercial and residential buildings for efficiencies stimulates the sustainable burgeoning business sector
• Smart garages pop up all over
• Decentralizing power gets its groove
• Co-generation power production goes wild
• Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle concept gets support
• Designers and architects get paid more to design-in efficiencies and less for inefficiencies
• The Feebate system takes hold on major appliances and vehicles
• State and local governments actually start becoming solvent from efficiencies
• We don’t attack the middle class because state and local governments won’t be going broke
Nukes were an offshoot from a weapons program, so is it any surprise that the effect on people isnt good?
Where does japan or any other nuke country go from here? shut them all down? no, not until another disaster hits you on the chin, besides, wheres the replacement?
Maybe time to go back to Hemp, and use it to grow energy and clean up radioactive soil.
Does this man know what he’s talking about? I think so! Weinberg was Director of ORNL,and invented and held the patents on the Light Water Reactor (LWR), of which the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) is one version; Fukushima plants are the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) version of LWRs. He was against the civil use of LWRs, because he, more than anybody, was aware of their safety fallabilities. His attempts to promote the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) for civil use were politically and militarily blocked. To his dying day, he never changed his mind that, because LFTRs burned thorium so efficiently and that there is sufficient thorium to provide power for tens of thousands of years, humankind’s whole future depended on LFTRs.
In his autobiography Weinberg confessed:
“I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on the breeder. For Society generally to achieve and maintain a standard of living of today’s developed countries depends on the availability of relatively cheap, inexhaustible sources of energy.”
When he says ‘breeder’, he’s talking about the ability of LFTRs to transmute thorium to fissile U233.
I blog on LFTRs in the UK. Google: “LFTRs to Power the Planet”
Lovins isnt against the nuclear Navy. So his arguments against the development of nuclear energy given this historic basis, are somewhat illogical.
This is particularly pertinentart, when considering that we can use the thorium, now treated as a waste product, in the mining of 5 of the 17 rare earth elements, essential for the powerful magnets used on wind turbines.
Put the two together you have atomic power as a deal with the Devil in which no acts of God may be permitted.
In August 1979 President Carter on a riverboat trip down the Mississippi at a town meeting was asked a question of what would happen to food supplies if an atomic power plant accident contaminated 150,000 square miles of land in the farm belt, an area equal to the combined areas of Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana.
President Carter responded that “if there was a nuclear disaster it would be a disaster.”
We are now about 32 years from the date of the accident at Three Mile Island and since that accident we have had Chernobyl and now Fukushima in Japan. That is three major accidents at atomic power plants in 32 years or about one major atomic power plant accident every 11 years.
Mike Lamb
My favorite - plant giant sunflowers on the south side of my house, gone in winter and a beautiful wall of green and yellow shade in summer. Someone posted the logistical, economic and ecological benefits of well stocked pantries. Moving up in price, solar and wind retrofits are cheap (as if cost should be the salient during a potential meltdown!) and designing new buildings to use less energy can and should save costs.
The biggest problem is political will. We allow our energy decisions to be controlled by those who profit from using only dirty energy sources at our grave peril. No one currently owns the sun or the wind like they do oil and uranium. Much less profit in selling a solar device that doesn’t require “refueling” from the company that sold it. They will deny a narrative that wind and solar energy work and are ready for prime-time. Of course good souls in the corporate world are working on clean energy - I don't want to paint with too broad a brush!
See EO13514 and http://transmission.bpa.gov/PlanProj/Wind/ to see what is being done at the Federal level.
Thank you for this article and your work at Rocky Mountain Institute, what an inspiration!
We have a green house effect enhanced by exess carbon dioxide. As a result, we have a melting continent of ice at our south pole. In response to that massive transit of mass, our tectonic plates are readjusting themselves. So, somebody who isn't hypnotized by Rush Limbaugh and the corporate spin doctors on the beltway, please tell me how this event in Japan must be an act of god, and not a result of human foolishness.
Yes natural disasters can happen but we must beat back the stupidity of nuclear power SHUT DOWNS.
Does anyone, here, who knows windmills and solar collectors are not enough to supply 7 billion people with enough power for a decent standard-of-living, believe trajedies should halt progress?
How 'bout experimental breast cancer treatment, that has been known to be fatal?
How 'bout airplanes after 9/11?
How machines we use in factories?
How 'bout a modern civilized society PERIOD?
If anyone believes that 6.7 billion people are going to sit back and suffer without electricity and potable water while you pat them on the back for saving the earth you've got to be crazy.
You got food riots happening right now and folks Winsconsin fighting for pension funds.
It's time to wake up and smell the coffee folks.
Unfortunately it's been a US-British policy for decades, starting with Kissinger's memorando 100 where it states that the resources of Africa and Latin America are only to benifit the West and not for their own self-interest.
We have the technologies and the capabilities to provide electricity and running water to every human family on the planet.