Heppner gazette-times., April 15, 1992, Page SIX, Image 6

SIX- Heppner Gazette-Times. Heppner, Oregon Wednesday, April 15, 1992
Nuclear Power
Nuclear-fission power plants were
initially thought to be the answer to the
diminishing fossil fuels. Even though the
enriched uranium fuel was also severely
limited, it was assumed that a more advanced
nuclear technology - referred to as "breeders"
-- would eventually be made commercially
viable. Breeder reactors would actually be
able to produce more radioactive
"fuel," in the form of plutonium, than they
consume. As a result, their plutonium fuel
would be renewable. This was a great concept
in engineering theory, although biologists had
continually warned that plutonium is one of
the most toxic elements known, it is very
difficult to handle, and it would remain
deadly for about 250,000 years. In addition, if
the "plutonium economy" was ever to become
a reality, millions of tons of plutonium would
have to be produced and shipped throughout
the U.S.
In spite of these long-term and
exceedingly difficult and dangerous
environmental concerns, conventional nuclear
reactors and their breeder offspring
constituted America s primary energy
strategy since the 1950's to resolve the
diminishing fossil fuel problem. However,
when the partial meltdown accident occurred
in 1979 at one of the new nuclear reactors at
Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, both
public and investor confidence in nuclear
fission technologies were shattered. And
although billions of taxpayers' dollars have
been used to develop and promote nuclear
energy systems, rather than solving the
diminishing fossil fuel problem, nuclear
technology has instead created an even more
awesome problem of its own -- radioactive
waste.
The radioactive waste problem is unique
for many reasons, but one of its most
insidious aspects involves the fact that it is
invisible to the human senses until disease or
death occurs. When moisture is present,
radioactive isotopes spread in an ecosystem
like red dye spreads in a glass of water, and
the isotopes will remain toxic for anywhere
from a few days to in excess of a million
years, depending on the isotope. There is still
no long-term storage plan for these waste
products and many of the existing waste
storage facilities are full and out of control in
terms of their ability to prevent the
radioactive wastes from leaking and
spreading.
This "spreading” problem occurs because
under irradiation, all materials change their
nature as their atoms become unstable. The
world of radioactivity is a world of
continuous change. This is why the storage
vessels which contain the radioactive wastes
are only reliable for short periods of time.
Eventually, they too will become radioactive.
This, in turn, means the longer a nuclear
reactor is operating, the more radioactive it
becomes. This is the primary reason why any
repair or maintenance of aging nuclear
reactors is an extraordinarily hazardous task.
Radioactivity
The problem of radioactivity in the reactor
and the surrounding building is in addition to
the liquid, gaseous and solid waste generated
by the uranium fuel rods. As the uranium
undergoes fission, the uranium atoms split,
and in so doing, release neutrons. Some of
these neutrons split other uranium atoms,
which, in turn, produce the radioactive waste
products. The net result of this fission process
is the generation of the intense heat that is
used to generate steam for the production of
electricity.
The difference between a nuclear reactor
and a nuclear weapon is measured by the
number of neutrons that are released in the
fission process over a given period of time. If
only a limited number of neutrons are
available for triggering the fission chain-
reaction the reaction can be controlled for
energy production purposes. If too many
neutrons are released, the chain-reaction will
rapidly accelerate, resulting in an atomic
explosion. To prevent this from happening,
nuclear reactors have control rods and water
circulation to regulate the fission process by
absorbing the extra neutrons.
However, during normal operations,
some of the neutrons that are released pass
beyond the uranium and into the steel
structures which hold both the fuel
assemblies and the cooling water which flows
between them. Other neutrons penetrate the
massive concrete shielding outside the steel
reactor vessel. These neutrons are absorbed
by the atoms of iron, nickel and other
elements that make up the steel, water, and
concrete. When atoms absorb neutrons, they
are rendered "unstable" (i.e., radioactive) for
various lengths of time. In the case of nickel-
59, which has a half-life of 80,000 years, it will
need to be shielded from humans for about a
million years.
Decommissioning
Decommissioning is the term used to
describe what happens to a nuclear reactor
complex once its theoretical useful life of 30 or
40 years has been completed. This "back end"
of the nuclear fuel cycle is generally not
discussed because no one really knows how
such a difficult task is to be accomplished, or
what it will ultimately cost over hundreds of
thousands of years. Utilities and waste
processing companies are usually not
concerned about the long-term waste storage
costs because in most cases, they have no
long-term legal or financial responsibility to
manage the radioactive wastes. That
responsibility is given to the U.S. taxpayers of
the future. But if the experience of attempting
to decommission a nuclear fuel recycling
plant at West Valley, New York is any
indication of what is ahead, there are plenty
of reasons to.be concerned.
The $32.5 million West Valley Plant,
located 30 miles Southeast of Buffalo, was
officially opened with much fanfare in June of
1963, although it did not actually begin to
reprocess nuclear wastes until 1966. But it was
only to operate for 6 years before its operator,
Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS), a subsidiary of
W.R. Grace's Davidson Chemical Company,
abandoned the facility. Left behind were 2
million cubic feet of buried radioactive trash
and 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive
liquid waste that is now seeping into the
Cattqaraugus Creek, which flows into Lake
Erie, from which the city of Buffalo obtains its
drinking water. The cost of cleanup is
estimated to be at least $1 billion, assuming
such a cleanup is possible.
The West Valley plant was the world’s
first commercial nuclear-waste facility that
would be able to take the spent fuel from
nuclear power plants and reprocess it for
renewed use. This recovery and reprocessing
of spent fuel rods is an important step in the
nuclear fuel cycle because only about 1 to 2
percent of the nuclear fuel is initially
consumed in most commercial reactors, and
uranium is not a renewable resource. This is
particularly true of the reactors in the U.S.
that require an energy intensive, highly
enriched uranium 239. Unfortunately, the
problems associated with trying to handle
highly radioactive wastes proved to be
overwhelming to the workers and
management at the West Valley facility. An
extensive investigative report on the West
Valley plant titled "Too Hot to Handle,"
undertaken by The New York Titties, concluded
the following:
"It is the story of technocrats who assured
and reassured the public that nuclear
recycling was safe and that a thoughtfully
engineered fail-safe system would minimize
the hazards of any accidentsthat might
possibly occur - without making it clear
that their assurances were based on
extrapolations from premises rooted in
probabilities and anchored in uncertainty.
It is the story of company officials who
repeated such assurances even after scores
o f incidents -- known only inside the
company and to a few governmental
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inspectors - had made it clear that leakage
of radioactivity in the plant was reaching
dangerous lei'els."
Radiation at the West Valley facility was
rapidly spreading, and the costs of operation
were dramatically increasing. Finally, in 1975,
NFS announced that it would have to spend
at least $600 million to make the facility
manageable, which was nearly twenty times
the initial capital cost of the plant. This, plus
the fact that operating costs had increased by
some 4,300 percent since the plant began
operation, caused NFS to shut the facility
down, and let the taxpayers of New York
figure out what to do with the multi-billion
dollar waste storage problem that was left
behind.
Nuclear Waste Storage
As it turns out, the West Valley facility in
New York is merely the tip of the nuclear
waste iceberg. The U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE) spent years and $700 million to
build the nation's first permanent waste
storage facility deep in salt beds near
Carlsbad, New Mexico. But only after the
facility was completed in 1988 did the DOE
officials acknowledge that water had
somehow leaked into the salty caverns. As a
result, the Carlsbad facility has been put on
hold, but the nuclear waste problem in the
U.S. is so critical that Idaho Governor Cecil
Andrus "declared war on the Department of
Energy” in October of 1988. Under the
governor's orders, state police halted any
further shipments of nuclear waste into the
State of Idaho.
The nuclear waste problem has been
around for decades, and in spite of the fact
that thousands of brilliant scientists have
been working on the problem, no one in any
country has come up with an acceptable long­
er term solution. Moreover, as the general public
learns more abduVthe waste problems, they
i become more and more convinced that they
don't want the toxic dump in their state.
Given this bleak outlook, the U.S. Congress
decided just hours before the Christmas
adjournment in 1987 that a place called Yucca
Mountain, located in a remote nuclear test site
in Nevada, was to be the nation’s final resting
place for high-level radioactive waste. Not
only was the area already radioactive, but
Nevada simply had less clout in Congress
that any other state. However, there are two
serious environmental problems associated
with the Yucca Mountain site.
First, scientists point out that the Yucca
Mountain area is in a geologically unstable
region with active volcanos and earthquakes.
Second, and perhaps more worrisome, is the
fact that the containers for the nuclear waste
are only expected to last for 300 to 1,000 years.
After that, it must be the mountain itself that
contains the waste products, and therein lies
the problem. Scientist from the U.S.
Geological Survey had drilled two small
shafts in Yucca Mountain and they found that
the mountain ’breathes." In the winter, warm
air flows out of the shafts from the center of
the mountain. In the summer, the pattern is
reversed and the air is sucked into the
mountain. In a memorandum, 17 scientists
from the USGS stated that this air flow could
release radionuclides into the atmosphere. In
spite of the scientific warnings, Yucca
Mountain is still viewed the primary
designated U.S. waste storage facility.
If that were not bad enough, in 1989,
officials from the U.S. Department of Energy
announced that in spite of the critical nature
of the nuclear weapons program, all three of
the nuclear weapons facilities had to be shut­
down due to massive technical problems
associated with dealing with the radioactive
waste. Department of Energy officials have
now admitted that extensive releases of
radiation had often contaminated workers
and large numbers of U.S. civilians who
happened to be living within the proximity of
these facilities. The general public was
deliberately not informed of these radiation
leaks for decades because of "national
security" considerations. As one Federal
official put it, the emphasis was not on safety,
but on production.
It has been estimated that it will take
anywhere from 100 to 150 billion dollars to
clean up the existing nuclear weapons
facilities, assuming such a clean-up is
possible. In reality, such clean-ups have meant
collecting and moving as much of the wastes
as possible to some other location, which
ultimately only creates another problem that
will eventually have to be dealt with.
True clean-ups have up till now proven to
be beyond the limits of existing technical and
engineering capabilities. This unresolved
technical problem has led to the concept of
"National Sacrifice Zones," which implies
sealing off the contaminated areas from the
members of the general public, presumably
for hundreds of centuries. Such a policy in
and of itself, poses some interesting social and
ethical problems. For example, imagine trying
to figure out how to make a sign or symbol
that could explain the radioactive danger
which could still be understood by our
descendants thousands of years into the
future. One can only wonder what the future
generations will think of this generation for
leaving them such awesome problems.
Questions of Safety
While nuclear proponents like to point
out that it is highly unlikely for a nuclear
fission power plant to explode like a nuclear
bomb, which of course is true, they never
bother to explain that given the amount of
radiation in the modem 1,000 megawatt
(mW) reactor, a serious loss of coolant
accident could result in a melt-down
condition which could be as dangerous as an
outright nuclear explosion. This is because the
amount of radiation in a 1,000 mW reactor is
more than a thousand times that which was
produced by the atomic bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In a melt­
down scenario, this massive amount of
deadly radiation could all be released at
ground-level, whereas a nuclear or
conventional chemical or steam explosion
would disperse much or most of the
radioactive particles high into the Earth's
atmosphere.
There are also other serious problems
associated with nuclear fission power plants.
Once a nuclear reactor becomes operational,
workmen are not able to dean and maintain
the critical interior components of the reactor
vessel due to the intense level of radiation.
This is in contrast to the normal procedure in
fossil fuel plants where maintenance
personnel are able to shut the plant down
periodically to clean and inspect all of the
critical interior components. This regular
maintenance schedule is a major reason why
there are so few accidents or failures in fossil
fuel power plants, in contrast to nuclear
fission facilities, whose unreliability has
become one of their most dependable
features.
Military vs. Civilian Reactors
In contrast to the civilian nuclear reactors
that have been plagued by accidents and
shutdowns, the U.S. Navy has established a
respectable performance record with its
nuclear surface ships and submarines. There
are, however, distinct differences in the size
and quality of the nuclear systems used by
the U.S. Navy, in contrast to the much larger
reactors engineered for commercial power
production. The most obvious differences
involve the reactor size, design configuration,
and cost per installed kilowatt (kW). The
reactors manufactured for the U.S. Navy are
all designed to be relatively small; they are all
based on a similar design concept; and they
were initially about five times more expensive
to construct (in terms of cost per kW) than
their civilian counterparts.
William E. Heronemus, now professor of
civil engineering at the University of
Massachusetts, supervised the construction of
nuclear submarines for Admiral Hyman