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Nuclear Tide
by Richard Karn 27-07-2006 |
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DETAIL 2: “It was as clear as mud but it covered the ground….”
[16]
Aside from conservation, for which the American culture appears to be singularly ill-suited, there is little we can do to lessen our dependence on imported oil for transportation purposes simply because there are presently no alternatives. Thankfully, relatively little oil is used in the generation of electrical power in the US. That is not to say oil does not factor in a discussion of base load electrical generation for strangely enough it is still a driving force. Increases in the price of oil shift emphasis to sibling fossil fuels, natural gas and coal, and when their prices increase sufficiently, there is cause for a re-evaluation of nuclear energy. If Energy Security and Global Warming are indeed considerations, no discussion can legitimately exclude nuclear energy simply because, for all of its faults, it has few drawbacks in these regards.
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Unfortunately, nuclear energy is the most polemic issue of our time. Entire careers, indeed the founding and rise of entire organizations, have been built on debunking or promoting nuclear energy. The issue is highly charged not least because of the staggering “inherent economic stakes,
[17]” as James Hansen puts it: electrical power generation in the United States in 2004 produced gross revenues of more than 193 billion dollars
[18], a sum greater than the gross national product of Denmark
[19]. With so much money on the table, spurious as well as specious claims abound. Dueling experts and biased polls present agendas as facts or popular opinion. The politics of fear are applied with equal vigor by either side. The levels of mis- and disinformation are such that getting a grasp on nuclear energy is akin to trying to tackle a greased pig.
Although the Emerging Trends Report (ETR) is hardly in a position to provide a definitive resolution to the debate, we feel it is vital to point out some of the more egregious myths, claims and counter-claims promulgated by the opposing sides as much in order to demonstrate the tactics being used as to facilitate something approaching a rational discussion of nuclear energy.
Chernobyl is the fulcrum used to lever public opinion. There is no arguing Chernobyl was a horrific accident. But it is important to understand that the type of reactor used at the Chernobyl facility was graphite moderated and the core was not housed inside a containment vessel. When the core overheated, due to human error, a steam explosion ignited the graphite which burned for days, releasing massive amounts of radioactivity directly into the atmosphere for lack of said containment vessel. By comparison, the US employs light water moderated reactors which cannot burn as Chernobyl did, houses these reactors in containment vessels, and by all accounts has far superior safety standards to those in operation at Chernobyl.
Comparing Chernobyl to the American nuclear industry is, for this very reason, not valid. Likening the accident at Chernobyl to something that could happen at American reactors, even by implication, is a blatant invocation of fear rather than fact to further an argument.
It is akin to using the design shortcomings of the Ford Pinto to
[20] condemn Volvos as firetraps.
Even the number of deaths at Chernobyl has become propaganda:
“How many (people) have died to date from the (Chernobyl) disaster is a controversial question. According to government agencies in the three former Soviet States affected, about 25,000 "liquidators" have died so far. Estimates provided by the liquidator associations in the three countries are well in excess of the official figures. The Chernobyl Forum's 2005 Report, on the other hand, attributes a far lower number of liquidator deaths to the reactor disaster.”
[21]
“A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident…however, as of mid-2005, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster.”
[22]
While certainly not intending to downplay the death and misery resulting from Chernobyl, the ETR suggests that we try to maintain some perspective on this critical issue rather then allowing ourselves to adopt black and white views based on sensationalism. By way of safety comparison, coal mining deaths, which are the leading cause of death within the industry, in the US alone averaged 45 fatalities per year for the 1990’s, the best decade on record
[23], while the civilian nuclear industry in the US has not suffered a fatality since the Wood River Junction criticality accident in 1964.
[24]
If the liberal organizations vilifying the nuclear industry are prone to exaggeration and hysteria, the conservative organizations profiting from it are equally prone to secrecy and reductionism; it may well have ever been thus.
The stellar safety record of the nuclear industry does not mean that it is without incidents, for they are far more common than the public generally believes. Earlier this year, for example, it was revealed that Exelon, an operator of nuclear power plants in Illinois, had experienced eight leaks over a period of ten years without ever bothering to disclose the fact to the public. In 1998, its Braidwood plant discharged three million gallons of water containing radioactive tritium that was still measurable eight years later
[25]. Litigation fears do not constitute a legitimate excuse when dealing with public safety and trust: omission simply is a sin.
Of course, Cockroach Theory allows such practices may be industry-wide.
[26]
This serves to underscore the shortcomings of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) oversight. Years of being undermanned and overstretched has amounted to the industry being for all intents and purposes self-policing—a conflict of interest that should alarm the general public. As Wall Street amply demonstrated in the 1990’s, industry regulation should not be left to those who stand to profit the most from abusing the system, no matter how much they promise they won’t. This lack of oversight certainly alarms the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who point out that since 1984 there have been 27 nuclear reactors shut down for repairs to safety equipment that required more than a year of downtime to remedy
[27], few of which drew media scrutiny.
The issue of the oversight and regulation ensuring public safety is not something that should be minimized or dismissed. The nuclear industry is confronting a whole new set of challenges it has not faced before, namely aging reactors which are by their very design parameters nearing the last phase of their operational lives. This presents new safety concerns that are especially worrying in light of the extensions being granted to the nuclear industry to effectively increase their plant lives by as much as 50%.
The situation is perhaps best visualized by the Bathtub Curve
[28], which was developed by the National Space and Aeronautical Administration (NASA) to depict the operational lifespan of, well, just about everything from a simple tool to a complex machine. Basically, when the rate of failure of an item such as a machine (or an animal for that matter) is plotted over a period of time it regularly takes the shape of a bathtub (see chart below), albeit of varying sizes.
As far as the nuclear power industry is concerned, the relevancy of the Bathtub Curve is in understanding the periods during which systems are most likely to encounter problems or to fail. The most notorious nuclear power station failures, from Fermi Unit 1 in 1966 to Three Mile Island Unit 2 in 1979 to Chernobyl Unit 4 in 1986, have occurred during the “Break-in Phase” on the above chart, generally within the first thirty months of operation.
[29]
With time, the overall performance kinks are worked out and a nuclear power plant enters its Middle Life, or peak operational, Phase. This is where most US plants find themselves today, which is reflected by the increased load factors and decreased electrical production costs of the last decade.
[30]
As nuclear power plants near the end of their Middle Life Phase, it is axiomatic that increased vigilance will be required to anticipate the problems sure to arise from age and fatigue preceding eventual retirement. Whether a recent spate of incidents at nuclear power plants is a statistical aberration or an indication that many of these plants are entering the Wear-out Phase remains to be seen
[31]. How these plants will perform during their extended life spans is anyone’s guess; however, considering the nuclear industry’s reluctance to disclose safety breaches, the de facto ceding of such NRC duties at a time monitoring clearly needs to be intensified is troubling enough that even the Government Accountability Office has expressed misgivings about it.
[32]
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