Thirty years ago, the word "meltdown" was seared into the American consciousness when the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, PA melted the radioactive fuel rods in the core of the reactor and began leaking radiation into the environment in the early morning hours of March 28, 1979.
Radiation leaked from the damaged reactor for days as government regulators scrambled to get radiation monitoring equipment into surrounding communities. The Governor of Pennsylvania eventually ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and children. The accident at Three Mile Island sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin. Already staggering under the weight of over $100 billion dollars in cost overruns, the meltdown showed Americans that not only was nuclear power expensive - it was also dangerous. The nuclear industry turned a multi-million dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability overnight, and demonstrated that both the government and industry were thoroughly unprepared for the accident and its aftermath.
But now that memories of the meltdown and the ensuing panic have faded, the nuclear industry and those in their employ are claiming that that Three Mile Island was really a success story and that the radiation was contained.
Remarkable! When you're being paid to promote a "nuclear renaissance," I suppose you have to dispose of some problematic facts. Contrary to the claims of the nuclear lobby, the Three Mile Island accident spewed radiation into the environment for days and crippled the U.S. nuclear industry. The question that has persisted since the accident isn't whether radiation was released but how much radiation was released.
Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) fact sheet on the Three Mile Island accident acknowledges that the meltdown resulted in a significant release of radiation. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 10 million curies of radiation escaped the damaged reactor core (a "curie" is a unit of radioactivity that denotes how many radioactive atoms in a particular collection of atoms are giving off radiation; 1 curie = 37 billion atoms giving off radiation). However, independent and unbiased nuclear engineers who reexamined the accident estimate that as much as 150 million curies of radiation may have escaped to the environment.
According to government reports on the accident, the radiation monitors went off scale before 8:00 a.m. on March 28, eliminating the only direct means of assessing the quantities and rate of release of radiation from the reactor. This information was vital to an accurate evaluation of the consequences of the meltdown.
The Department of Energy (DOE) later dispatched a helicopter to take measurements in the radioactive cloud escaping the damaged reactor core. The radiation detected by the DOE's helicopter indicated that the atomic plume could be detected out to a distance of 16 miles from the reactor. Yet the nuclear industry and their lobbyists would have the public believe that the release of as much as 150 million of curies of radiation into the communities near Three Mile Island was without consequence. Don't believe it.
Despite the government and nuclear industry denials, a peer-reviewed study conducted in 1997 by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina found that lung cancer and leukemia rates downwind from Three Mile Island were two to ten times higher than cancer rates upwind of the accident.
Even the nuclear cheerleaders at the NRC acknowledge that "exposure to any level of radiation is assumed to carry with it a certain amount of risk." The scientific community generally assumes that any exposure to ionizing radiation may cause undesirable biological effects and that the likelihood of these effects increases as the dose increases. The NRC's fact sheet on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation states that, "any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, and that the risk is higher for higher radiation exposures." There is no such thing as a "safe" dose of radiation.
On this 30th anniversary of the accident at Three Mile Island, it's important that we remember the meltdown and its aftermath. As nuclear corporations attempt to resell reactors as clean and safe, we must remember that Three Mile Island revealed the truth about the nuclear industry. Not only is nuclear power expensive; it's also dangerous and deadly.
- Jim Riccio is the Nuclear Policy Analyst for Greenpeace in Washington, DC.
More information on the abysmal economics and dangers of nuclear power can be found on the Greenpeace web site. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/nuclear
The government documents referenced in this article can not be found on the NRC's web site but have been posted online by Dickinson College. http://www.threemileisland.org/resource/index.php?aid=00027
Wonder why.
Maybe the technology of today is more advanced than that of 2 or 3 decades ago.
Duh.
Neither lately, nor at any time, has anyone in France, or out of it, been physically harmed by a nuclear meltdown. At all. Meanwhile, the major non-nuclear sources of energy routinely kill. Among them, the fossil fuels provide both the deaths of a few people, and significant revenues -- e.g. those documented at http://www.opec.org/library/Special%20Publications/pdf/WGW2008.pdf to a great many people.
France dumps it's nuclear waste all over the planet.
A France Reprocessing plant burned out of control, releasing vast amount of radiation.
How do you KNOW it hasn't caused excess cancers: Killed people?
You don't.
Why do you want to increase the risk Global Thermonuclear war triggered by a terrorist or a failed state, for energy we can get elsewhere?
Next up: Debunking "clean" coal.
You seem to have death wish. You want completely unregulated markets, which crash and kill people, leading to world wars, and you want to risk the end of all life for electric we can get from other places.
Why? Even Coal won't suddenly end all life.
It has its best location - the Sun.
Please, keep it there.
another good place for nukes.
the Nagasaki bomb (80,000). Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been rebuilt and with
larger populations than ever. Question: which kills more people yearly, radioactivity or
non-military explosives? Think construction/mining accidents involving dynamite.
Japan who suffered Hiroshima and Nagasaki is expanding their Nuclear Energy program
(30% total energy use in 2005, 40% by 2010).
The Chernobyl accident contaminated Pripyat River which feeds into the Dnieper River; in
a few years the water was deemed safe. Many animals at the time of the accident
died or were sick of radiation poisining. The next generation had a number of defects.
Subsequent generations were judged defect-free.
Question: which kills more people yearly, radioactivity or hydroelectric power?
I don't want Nukes OR Coal. But Nukes are worse.
We don't need to risk all life on earth for electricity.
Some try to convince us we can separate the Energy technology from the bomb technology.
We haven't yet.
Some compare deaths from routine operations of nuclear power plants, as if the waste would not last a million years, as if the risk of a terrorist dirty bomb or nuclear bomb was not increased by increased use of nuclear power.
This is the same short sighted thinking that allowed AIG to issue Insurance without reserve.
Shortsightedness with nuclear technology is truly apocalyptic in it's consequences.
What are the odds that a single terrorist nuke, will trigger a world nuclear war?
We can get our energy from solar and wind. Do no believe those who say otherwise.
1. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants are one in the same?
2. The AIG "melt down" portends a nuclear power plant melt down?
3. Terrorists are awaiting the building of more nuclear power plants so as to implement the development of a nuclear weapon?
While I genuinely applaud your altruistic and studied concern for humanity and its environment I cannot accept the assumptions that we are destined to "shortsightedness" and hence apocalyptic disaster with respect to the nuclear power industry and, therefore, can never derive benefit from it. Nor is it plausible to think that a terrorists only access to nuclear materials lies with continued development of nuclear power facilities in the US. More likely, the missing weaponry from the failed USSR is more the suspect. Even more so, it is unlikely that the rest of the world would follow suit whether we ceased power plant development or not. The reality is that, in this world, nuclear power is here to stay, like it or not. Given the apparent nature of your commitment, fervor and tenacity, it might be better applied to insuring that the nuclear power industry is adequately monitored so as to eliminate any valid concern regarding shortsightedness and incident.
The AIG folks thought the housing bubble would never burst. They had computer models that proved it.
If Nuclear power technology is no dual use for Bomb making,
why do we care about Iran's Nuclear POWER refinement activities?
This batch of pro nuke trolls seems to have an PR agenda: use what ever argument you can, false or not, to win. So you probably are paid by the nuclear industry.
In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
More people (> 100) died in the past 10 years installing and maintaining Windpower in the US than from Nuclear Energy worldwide.
More people died of melanoma (from Sun exposure) than from Nuclear Energy. In the installation of
solar energy systems, how many people will die of heat stroke, melanoma? How many will be
disfigured by basal cell carcinoma? How many will suffer from cataracts from UV overexposure?
Production of PV panels uses a lot of toxic chemicals. How many people will die from cancer secondary to the exposure to said toxic chemicals?
In the installation of solar energy systems, how many people will die ... from UV overexposure?
Good points. The Sun is very handy for workplace illumination, but does include deadly rays, like those of nuclear waste in its early decades, so those people who refer to that stuff as "toxic" are on rather thin ice if they do otherwise than say sunlight is also toxic.
If you look at the recent ~200-gigawatt spate of gas-fired power plant construction, and understand that each plant full-power year of operation uses about $250 million worth of natural gas, and that this includes $40 million in royalties, plus drives up natgas prices in other markets where it is taxed, you will understand that the many nuclear plants that were stopped in the construction phase would, if they were operating now, be depriving government of several billion dollars per year in natural gas revenue. That is the money that drives antinuclear casuistry; plus, maybe, a little from the gas suppliers themselves.
So your later points about chemicals from PV plants are, in themselves, not good, and also not to the point. Wind, solar, conservation are all *tokens* beloved of the gas interests. Wind turbines kill a lot of people per gigawatt-year, but the main death-dealing their proponents intend is from the fossil fuels that back them up, and financially sustain, through government cheques, those proponents.
After that, they might salt the ocean. Deeply buried nuclear waste is the same: coals to Newcastle, baby pee in the ocean. Read M. King Hubbert's "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels". He treats the problem honestly.
It's all relative: Overall nuclear power is nowhere near as dangerous and deadly as power from coal. It's also an essential part of any effective package to combat global climate change in the medium term. Even Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace eventually came round to that conclusion:
http://www.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/energypmp/greenpeace.html
Regretably, Mr Kessler's article is close to Republican fear and smear, and in scientific terms like the Pope commenting on condoms and AIDS.
PS. I do have a PhD in Chemical Engineering, but have no connection to the nuclear industry and am a member of the Sierra Club.
Coal will never allow folks to create nuclear bombs, will it?
Coal's radioactive emission are 1/1000th of the radioactively produced in a single reactor.
Roof top solar and eliminate the need for coal and nukes, forever. Cheaper, safer, less grid load, faster. Sorry to all your folks who work in the Nuke industry, but really, there will more and safer jobs in solar energy.
Plus, what's the difference in quantity between fission waste and coal ash? Hundreds, thousands of times? I'm still for going solar, but I get tired of all the nuke hating.
The Systemic risk is what you miss.
The systemic risk for nuclear power is truly apocalyptic.
That's why the Government has to insure the insurance companies that cover nukes.
Really? Just goggle reactor generates liquid waste
to prove that wrong.
So you pro nukes folks bait and switch: The "once through" is a disastrously wasteful dead end.
Wait, you say, We have these new experimental liquid thorium reactors.
Hey wait, I thought you said it wasn't a liquid?
One real problem is enough. If they're all something other than real, then yes, it's good to have a portfolio of them. Also known as whack-a-mole; read an AGW "debate" some time.
" ... is who would pay for any accidents?"
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html
http://www.nuclearpowerprocon.org/pop/Price-Anderson.htm
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/feb97/wing.html
The peer-reviewed paper is Environmental Health Perspectectives 105(1):52 and free on PubMed. He did not do a study, per se, but a critique of work done in 1990 by the group assigned to look for a relation between cancer rates. The peer-reviewed paper itself does not say cancer rates downwind are two to ten times those upwind; you would have to subselect from the support that statement.
The 1997 re-analysis gave essentially the same numerical results as the original study, but different conclusions. This resulted in a lively exchange of letters to the editor, also available on PubMed, resulting in the disclosure that the re-analysis was requested and paid for by attorneys for plaintiffs in a class-action suit.
The original 1990 study was pretty serious work, and actually did find some cancer rates to be relatively higher in the downwind locations, but "overall ... no convincing evidence that radiation releases ... influenced cancer risk". A longer-term followup published in 2003 [E.H.P. 111(31):341] came to similar conclusions.
Searching PubMed for "cancer coal miners" is sobering.
The 15 Million Curies is a made up number based on nothing.
The 5 Million Curies is a made up number based on nothing. The actual release was 43,000 Curies of radioactive Krypton, and possibly 20 Curies of radioiodine. Significant quantities without a doubt, but nowhere near the millions cited in the screed.
There is only one heavily contested epidemiological study showing an increase in cancer deaths downwind of TMI after the accident.
The maximum radiation exposure as a result of the accident to anyone not on TMI property (the protected area) was roughly one millirem (less than a chest x-ray).
Please, don't be a sheep. Find out the real facts. They're available.
Daniel Kessler is either lying outright or doesn't know what he's talking about. There is no third option.