The Truth About Nuclear Energy

Last week at an Arizona nuclear plant, guards, who are required to search every vehicle that enters the grounds, detained an employee at a checkpoint 1.5 miles from the plant when a five-inch long improvised pipe bomb was found in his truck. The news media kept referring to the pipe bomb as a scary threat and speculating on various deadly but impossible scenarios. But did this incident reveal how vulnerable our nuclear plants are? And if a pipe bomb were detonated at the plant, would a dangerous release of radioactive pollution occur? And what source of electricity generation poses the greatest risk to public health?

As an opponent of nuclear plants who believed them to pose a great risk, I went on a nuclear tour of America with a scientist, Dr. D. Richard ("Rip") Anderson. Among other things, he's an expert in risk assessment, environmental health, and nuclear safety. Having led several big programs at Sandia National Laboratories, he has a high-level security clearance. Even with his credentials we couldn't just drop in at a nuclear power plant. To arrange visits took months. We had to provide all our data to a liaison and to wait for approval. We were given a date and time to appear at the gate. We had to have a guide who worked for the company with us at all times. On the road to the plant, our escort pointed out security cameras. We were already being watched. We had to pass various checkpoints guarded by burly men with AK-47s. They wore bullet-proof vests hung with electronic communications equipment. Even though we rode in a company car, the squad checked its underside and trunk, and had us get out and walk about half a block away from it so that some other, unexplained search could occur. Meanwhile, inside a guard booth our IDs were being checked by an official who made phone calls. After what seemed a rather long time, we were permitted to continue. We passed a plant fire department and a clinic. The administration building that stood between us and the heart of the plant was protected by big concrete jersey barriers. Later we were to see hydraulic pop-up barriers that can stop a speeding tractor-trailer truck cold. Once inside that building we had to be approved by another armed squad, pass through metal detectors, and have our belongings X-rayed while being scrutinized by even bigger, burlier, and more heavily beweaponed guards on the other side.

All this took place in a room that was partitioned at one end by a big one-way mirror-walled cubicle. Once we passed through the detectors I could see through an open door the dim interior. There, several people were watching video monitors. Others were watching us. Our escort showed an official some documents and a laminated pass. We were then issued passes that were electronically linked to her pass. Next we each had to put a hand in a box that instantly makes thousands of measurements of the geometry of the palm. Each palm is unique. And, our escort assured us, you can't use a severed hand as ID in the palm sensor because the lack of circulation changes the measurements. We then successively swiped our cards and one by one passed through a floor-to-ceiling turnstile made of case-hardened steel bars.

Our guide told us to remain within her sight at all times. Now we entered the enclosure where the plant made reliable, around-the-clock electricity, without producing greenhouse gases, for about a million people. The whole area was enclosed by an earthen bulwark with motion sensors and cameras, multiple razor-wire barriers, and concentric rows of high hurricane fences, and all these lines of defense were inspected by foot patrols with guard dogs. Above us rose reactor containment buildings with walls of dense concrete reinforced with steel bars the thickness of a man's arm. This defensive construction was tested long ago in bunkers built to protect observers from thermonuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site. Each containment building, negatively pressurized, was perhaps six stories high. But the reactor itself was about 10 stories underground, anchored in bed rock and enclosed in a pressure vessel of steel five inches thick. The actual core where the fuel rods produced the heat that was carried away to make steam to turn turbines was twelve feet by twelve feet. Very few employees are permitted to enter the reactor building, and the airlock is seldom opened. The temperature is very high. If a trespasser could somehow find a way to get down to the pressure vessel, where water circulates among the fuel rods, cooling them, and if he had access to special equipment necessary to move the extremely heavy fuel rods out of the reactor, he would perish within minutes from their radiation.

In an experiment, a fighter jet rammed at five hundred miles an hour into a thick concrete wall only made a scratch two centimeters deep before pancaking. (A link to a video of this is in the FAQ section of my website.) An airliner -- a big tin can full of fuel, as one engineer describes it -- would make even less of an impact on a containment building. Rip Anderson and other experts told me that about the only way to breach the reactor containment and the pressure vessel would be by dropping a thermonuclear weapon directly on them.

But I know of a scarier threat that's not hypothetical. It's happening all the time. North of the plant, in the Four Corners Area, huge coal-fired plants belch out brown plumes that stream on for hundreds of miles. Arizonans were worried about radioactivity might take note that coal combustion releases 100 to 400 times the low-dose radiation that a nuclear plant does. In fact, if you eat one banana you're getting much more radiation exposure from its potassium-40 isotopes than you would from living next to a nuclear plant for a year. But I'm not concerned about low-dose radiation; I grew up in New Mexico, where natural background radiation is higher than in most states, and yet the state has one of the lowest incidences of cancer in the nation. And people living near Spokane in Washington State are more than three times the exposure from nature that New Mexicans do. No, I am worried about the fine particulates, mercury, and noxious and global-warming gases these behemoths spew into the environment.

By the end of the tour it became obvious to me that the slightest incident at a nuclear plant, even if it occurs far from any reactor and poses no risk to the public, is usually given three-alarm treatment by the media, whereas the large-scale, relentless, ongoing risks from fossil fuel combustion are ignored. Our biggest reliable sources of our basic electricity supply are fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. There is nothing speculative about the fact that as coal combustion provides half of our electricity it causes the premature deaths of more than 24,000 Americans a year in addition to hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Is this acceptable?

Nuclear power, while providing one-fifth of our electricity and three-quarters of our emissions-free electricity, has never caused a single death to a member of the American public.

Gwyneth Cravens is the author of the recently published Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.

Comments

[JimHopf]

Gwyneth,

This was an excellent, well written post. The last three paragraphs, especially, get to the real heart of the matter.

[chayimito]

Cravens' last line is compelling:
"Nuclear power, while providing one-fifth
of our electricity and three-quarters of our emissions-free electricity, has never caused a single death to a member of the American public."

Nuclear energy is our best source for dependable energy and a clean environment.

We need to stop debating this issue to death and start building reactors.

[LarryG]

Good article.

Since the introduction of electricity in the late 1800's, it is a fact that our average life-spans have increased. The more energy available to people, the longer and better they live. Nuclear power is a good way to bring us more energy.

In fifty-plus years of observing nuclear power, I just don't see the dangers. Fifty years of an amazingly safe history tells me that nuclear power has earned its place as a viable power source for us. Nulear power detractors have cried wolf and the "sky will fall" for forty years, but their worries have not materialized. Do they not see this?

I want my grandchildren to enjoy the good life that I enjoy. I want them to live longer than me. Like Craven, I recognize that we can help give our successors a better and longer future by supporting nuclear power.

To alter (corrupt?) a phrase from my teenage years, "Nuclear Power to the People!" : )

[atomicrod]

I have been following with some interest the attention paid to the Palo Verde incident. It is important to remember that the initiating event was a security guard finding a 5" pipe full of fireworks grade explosives in an open pick-up bed. The discovery was made at the security gate of a nuclear plant. The security gate is more than a mile and a half away from the plant itself. According to the information available about the "bomb" it would have caused some damage to things within 20 feet away. Based on my knowledge of explosives, I think that is a generous estimate based on the description.

This discovery caused one of the mothers of overreaction for which the nuclear industry is famous. It negatively affected the lives of thousands of workers and caused undue stress on many people in the town located tens of miles from the plant.

No one was ever in any danger and there is no evidence at all that there was any kind of organized effort to damage the plant. The worker has a strong background, a security clearance and a pretty good explanation of how something could get into the back of his truck without his knowledge. It is, after all, a pick-up truck that is often parked for weeks at a time - the man normally rides a motorcycle.

All of the security precautions that Ms. Cravens mentions exist and provide multiple layers of expensive protection for some of the safest industrial facilities known to man. The extra cost of those precautions are simply rolled into the cost of generating electricity and passed on to the customers. According to the latest data, even with all of those precautions, nuclear electricity costs only 1.72 cents per kilowatt hour (that is all production costs including the used fuel fee, fuel, worker's salaries, repairs, and security.) That is a bargain.

The extra costs are tolerated by the industry in a vain attempt to reassure people who refuse to be reassured. Nuclear is far safer than its fossil fuel competition.

[kenseek]

Nuclear energy is such a touchy and polarized topic that it is difficult to find someone as clear, sober, factual and intellectually honest as Gwyneth Cravens. As Cravens points out in her impressive book, spent fuel rods do not readily converted to atomic weapons use. Safety is over the top at nuclear power plants and disposing nuclear waste is a serious task but one that can be handled prudently and reasonably. I was concerned about all of the above but an open-minded reading of the science allayed my concerns. All other forms of alternative energy should be pursued. In the meantime nuclear power plants can do the heavy lifting far more safely than coal.

[PondhillNYUSA]

As Gwyneth Cravens shows in her new book POWER TO SAVE THE WORLD, no form of feasible energy is without risks. There are only three sources of baseload energy (a consistent current 24/7, and therefore the only sources which can work on a mass scale)--hydro, carbon-based and nuclear. All other forms are too inconsistent, and appropriate for supplemental use only.
Yes, human being can screw up anything, but in the face of certain global warming and other environmental disasters created by carbon-based fuel sources (hydro, energy generated by water current via natural flow, dams, etc., is limited by geography), I don't see how one can not see that nuclear power, in spite of its risks particularly with regard to its waste, is by far the best strategy to save our planet and satisfy the energy needs of a growing world population. Reading this book and learning the SCIENCE of nuclear power generation caused a kind of "Saul on the Road to Damascus" moment in me. I saw that there is a possibility in the here and now to combat global warming. Conservation and development of alternate energy sources are CRUCIAL to any strategy, but not to take advantage of the incredible resource of the split atom is reckless and ignorant.
Thank goodness this book is out now to show that there is an immediate way out of the destruction of global warming. We ignore science at our own peril.

[JudyGee]

The media, both on TV and in print, gave very little in the way of information about this event. I would think that trucking a pipe bomb into a nuclear reactor location might require some exploration, despite how safe you say they are. The story, the mystery surrounding what this is all about remains a mystery. It makes me want to barf from anxiety, just like the other government controlled fakery we now call news.

[CriminallySane]

"...the only way to breach the reactor containment and the pressure vessel would be by dropping a thermonuclear weapon directly on them."

If memory serves, this was a "nightmare scenario" described in an issue of Scientific American around 30 years ago. It was at that point that I realized that our missile silos were never targets for Russian ICBMs, nor were theirs for us. To destroy a nation in a nuclear war, the real strategy would be to target nuclear power stations upwind of population centers* and let the massive "nuclear footprint" take care of the rest.

* Seems to be the case quite often...

[SolarPowerGuy]

"[T]he slightest incident at a nuclear plant... is usually given three-alarm treatment by the media, whereas the large-scale, relentless, ongoing risks from fossil fuel combustion are ignored."

My quick answer to the remark is, why should we ignore EITHER risk?

My somewhat longer answer to your article begins with the observation that the nuclear power plant itself is NOT the weakest link in the risk-management chain. When nuclear fuel is manufactured, transported, or discarded, it is more vulnerable -- not to meltdowns, but to theft. This theft is already a big worry in Russia, and it could eventually be problematic here (see below).

As for your visit to the nuke plant, notice how much the security measures there depend on PEOPLE. The engineering side is similarly complex and disciplined. What other method of power generation requires a legion of warriors and priests to protect it? Do you really trust America to do this job perfectly for as long as it is needed? The Russians have already failed.

Once discarded, nuclear fuel requires decades to millenia to degrade to the point where it isn't a hazard or a potential weapon. The same need for large numbers of dedicated, knowledgeable people applies to the fuel dump as to the power plant -- only the time scale is much, much longer.

Finally: if the risks in nuclear power generation are so obviously low, why does the nuke industry continue to demand (and receive) renewals of the Price-Anderson Act? We taxpayers, pay for all nuclear power accident costs above $300 million per site (power plant, waste dump, etc.). The law was enacted way back in the 1950's. Shouldn't this wonderfully safe industry have outgrown public subsidy by now? Why won't private insurance companies cover nuclear power?

Before you ask: Prius in my driveway, solar panels on my roof.

[SamThornton]

Ah, if it were only so simple.

Ironically, one of the Google Ads that showed up when I loaded this page had a link to the Union of Concerned Scientists interactive map of nuclear stations in the US, along with current information about health and safety concerns for each. Very interesting.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html

It would be pleasant to believe that there exists some sort of magic bullet to cure our energy woes painlessly, such as the cheery atom. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be one yet available on this planet at this time.

[kingcityguru]

Finally a balanced comment on nuclear energy. It is not perfect, but it has the chance to be made to do so since it arrives with the benefit of being CO2 and air pollution free.

The only hope for this planet -- a planet in which India and China and other parts of the world will do whatever is necessary to industrialize -- is the wide-scale acceptance of nuclear energy for the generation of electricity. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- every country can do that an immediately Kyoto protocal levels are met and exceeded and the air gets cleaner and lives will be improved and saved.