The Price of Nuclear Illiteracy

“Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire.”  —Albert Einstein

I lived in San Diego county, California for over 50 years. The San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant is located about twenty miles from where I lived. I was a teenager when construction of the first San Onofre nuclear reactor began. I was in Vietnam with the U.S. Army in 1968 when the first San Onofre reactor was completed and went online.

In 2008 the San Onofre Nuclear Power plant will have been in operation for 40 years. During its years of operation, San Onofre experienced several earthquakes that have severely shaken the ground in California; highway bridges have collapsed and people have been killed, but I don’t recall hearing about any serious problems at the nuclear power plant. Based on my personal experience, I would have to say that nuclear power must be safe.

Keeping an open mind and continuing to learn new things is important to me. For this reason, when confronted with emotionally charged issues that promote extreme views, I strive to think independently and question the reasons for the bias. I look for the hidden assumptions as well as the not so hidden agendas. I search for new information. I want to discover the missing pieces of the puzzle. I want to see the bigger picture. I believe that knowing what is right and true is more important than being right. I enjoy a lively argument, but winning an argument just for the sake of winning is not something I value. These principles have guided my personal inquiry into the subject of nuclear energy. It did not take long for me to discover that the pervasive anti-nuclear propaganda hyped by the national media had influenced my assumptions and caused me to have irrational fears about nuclear energy and nuclear radiation.

The purpose of this web page is to share the information that I have found that has helped me to dispel my own misconceptions and exaggerations about the dangers of nuclear energy and nuclear radiation.

     — Ron Bengtson, Founder, AmericanEnergyIndependence.com

If you want an expert’s opinion of the psychology behind the irrational nuclear fears, take a few minutes and read A PBS interview with Dr. Robert DuPont, a psychiatrist and expert on fears and phobias who has studied and analyzed social perceptions of nuclear energy.  
— Dr. Robert L. DuPont is a practicing psychiatrist and a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is also the author of “The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction” and “Nuclear phobia—phobic thinking about nuclear power: A discussion with Robert L. DuPont”.

Fears of nuclear energy are irrational — created by widespread public ignorance of nuclear technology and nuclear radiation. America’s leaders can and must turn this around. A nationwide Nuclear Literacy initiative is needed now.

National Literacy programs have succeeded in the past. For example:

Computer illiteracy — Desktop computer skills required for your job, personal electronic banking, home PC’s — when the new technology began appearing in the 1980’s a lot of people were afraid and resisted it. However, when the usefulness of the Personal Computer became obvious and its future role in society inevitable, then public and private institutions throughout America acknowledged the need to provide adults and children with computer education — a national computer literacy initiative was launched. Computer illiteracy, once a widespread social problem, is now a footnote in American history.

During the 1980’s the United States faced another national challenge: public ignorance of HIV. In June 1981, the first cases of what is now known as AIDS were reported in the USA. The initial response was a call for a national quarantine —isolate anyone who is HIV positive— protect the public from exposure. But national leaders resisted the call for quarantine. The public was told that they were safe, because the disease could not be transmitted without an “exchange of body fluids”. Immediately there were questions — “could the virus mutate to become airborne and infectious like the flu?” The public was told that although it was possible for the virus to mutate, there was an extremely low “probability” of that happening. Some voices cried out saying, “but if it did happen, if the virus did mutate into an airborne infection—the worst case scenario— half of the world’s population could be wiped out by this modern-day plague!” A national AIDS literacy initiative was launched.

If national literacy programs were able to create public acceptance of the plague of the 20th century, and also help society embrace and master a radical new technology in less time than it takes for a new generation to reach adulthood, is it possible that a national nuclear literacy program could overcome the irrational fear of nuclear radiation?

Opposition to nuclear energy is motivated by fear of the “worst case scenario”, based on imagination rather than real-world experience.

In any field of endeavor, it is easy to concoct a possible accident scenario that is worse than anything that has been previously proposed, although it will be of lower probability. One can imagine a gasoline spill causing a fire that would wipe out a whole city, killing most of its inhabitants. It might require a lot of improbable circumstances combining together, like water lines being frozen to prevent effective fire fighting, a traffic jam aggravated by street construction or traffic accidents limiting access to fire fighters, some substandard gas lines which the heat from the fire caused to leak, a high wind frequently shifting to spread the fire in all directions, a strong atmospheric temperature inversion after the whole city has become engulfed in flame to keep the smoke close to the ground, a lot of bridges and tunnels closed for various reasons, eliminating escape routes, some errors in advising the public, and so forth. Each of these situations is improbable, so a combination of many of them occurring in sequence is highly improbable, but it is certainly not impossible.

If anyone thinks that is the worst possible consequence of a gasoline spill, consider the possibility of the fire being spread by glowing embers to other cities which were left without protection because their firefighters were off assisting the first city; or of a disease epidemic spawned by unsanitary conditions left by the conflagration spreading over the country; or of communications foul-ups and misunderstandings caused by the fire leading to an exchange of nuclear weapon strikes. There is virtually no limit to the damage that is possible from a gasoline spill. But as the damage envisioned increases, the number of improbable circumstances required increases, so the probability for the eventuality becomes smaller and smaller. There is no such thing as the "worst possible accident," and any consideration of what terrible accidents are possible without simultaneously considering their low probability is a ridiculous exercise that can lead to completely deceptive conclusions.

The same reasoning applies to nuclear reactor accidents. Situations causing any number of deaths are possible, but the greater the consequences, the lower is the probability. The worst accident the Reactor Safety Study (RSS) considered would cause about 50,000 deaths, with a probability of one occurrence in a billion years of reactor operation. A person's risk of being a victim of such an accident is 20,000 times less than the risk of being killed by lightning, and 1,000 times less than the risk of death from an airplane crashing into his or her house.

But this once-in-a-billion-year accident is practically the only nuclear reactor accident ever discussed in the media. When it is discussed, its probability is hardly ever mentioned, and many people, including Helen Caldicott, who wrote a book on the subject, imply that it's the consequence of an average meltdown rather than of 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns. I have frequently been told that the probability doesn't matter—the very fact that such an accident is possible makes nuclear power unacceptable. According to that way of thinking, we have shown that the use of gasoline is not acceptable, and almost any human activity can similarly be shown to be unacceptable. If probability didn't matter, we would all die tomorrow from any one of thousands of dangers we live with constantly.

- Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
  The Worst Possible Accident
  Excerpt from his book: THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION
  (Dr. Cohen has given permission to use excerpts from his book on this website.)

What are the chances that you or someone you love will be killed in a car accident tomorrow? Some people are so afraid of that possibility that they refuse to drive or ride in cars.

We helplessly watched on TV as a single commercial airplane took down one of the World Trade Center towers, and a second airplane took down the other tower. What are the chances that an airplane will crash into the place where you work tomorrow?

It could happen. But what are the odds?

The art of estimating the odds is based on the mathematics of probability. Insurance companies and gambling casinos depend on the accuracy of the math.

It is possible to estimate the probability of a commercial airplane crashing into a football stadium during a game and killing 50,000 fans who are sitting in the stadium watching the game. Because such a thing is possible should you be afraid to go to the ball game? It is also possible to estimate the probability of a nuclear power plant reactor meltdown, or radiation leak into the environment. But what are the odds? Do you know that it is more likely that you will die in the football stadium accident, than from an accident related to nuclear energy?

Why do so many people refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary advance of technology? Why do some people, who are well educated, refuse to believe that future technology can solve today's problems?

We can believe in the advance of future technology, because today's technology is the proof — Today's technology has solved problems that we faced 25 years ago. In the past 25 years we have witnessed almost miraculous advances in telecommunications, biotechnology, engineering and computing.

Many of the engineering problems involving nuclear electricity generation 25 years ago do not exist today, because technology has advanced beyond the limitations that represented those problems.

Dr. Cohen's probability reference in his above excerpt is from a study that based its findings on the safety of 1970's nuclear technology. The new Generation III+ Nuclear Reactors, available today (in the year 2008), are estimated to be 1,000 times safer!

What have we done to ourselves? We have cut-off nuclear energy in response to our irrational fears. What would have happened if society had rejected the personal computer revolution because people feared the technology? What would our society be like today if our leaders had chosen to respond to our fear of AIDS, imprisoning everyone with HIV symptoms?

The vast majority of Americans lack a basic knowledge of physics and engineering. Far too many people believe—assume—that a nuclear power plant can explode like a nuclear bomb if something goes wrong. That notion is a misconception. A nuclear bomb is an entirely different technology.

When uranium atoms fission, they split apart and release energy. An atomic bomb releases tremendous amounts of energy instantaneously. For this reason, a nuclear explosion requires a very high concentration of fissionable uranium. Fuel in nuclear power plants has a very low concentration of fissionable uranium - only about 3 percent - which causes the energy to be released at a very low rate. Nuclear energy reactors cannot become nuclear bombs.

Opponents of nuclear energy exploit public ignorance and the public fear of a nuclear explosion. The media is just as guilty — fear sells, increasing the network's ratings.

If a nuclear reactor cannot explode like a nuclear bomb, then what is a "Meltdown" and how dangerous is it?
Professor Bernard L. Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh has provided a very good answer to that question:

In 1978, a movie called "The China Syndrome," based on this sort of thinking and starring some of Hollywood's top performers, gained widespread popularity. When the Three Mile Island accident followed in 1979, it became the news media story of the decade, complete with days of suspense during which the public was led to believe that a horrible disaster could occur at any moment. This combination of events led to very serious problems for the nuclear power industry.

As a result of these developments, the word meltdown has become a household word. We will use it here, although it is no longer used by risk analysis scientists. In the mind of the public, it refers to an accident in which all of the fuel becomes so hot that it forms a molten mass which melts its way through the reactor vessel. Let's use the word in that sense. The media frequently referred to it as "the ultimate disaster," evoking images of stacks of dead bodies amid a devastated landscape, much like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb attack.

On the other hand, the authors of the two principal reports on the Three Mile Island accident¹, ² agree that even if there had been a complete meltdown in that reactor, there very probably would have been essentially no harm to human health and no environmental damage. I know of no technical reports that have claimed otherwise. Moreover, all scientific studies agree that in the great majority of meltdown accidents there would be no detectable effects on human health, immediately or in later years. According to the government estimate, a meltdown would have to occur every week or so somewhere in the United States before nuclear power would be as dangerous as coal burning.

Even the Chernobyl accident, which was worse in many ways than any meltdown that can be envisioned for an American reactor, caused no injuries outside the plant. That is not to say that it is impossible to have fatalities caused by a meltdown, but it is estimated that in no more than 1 in a 100 meltdowns could any be obviously related to the accident.

One of the principal reasons for the discrepancy between the public's impressions and the technical analyses is that nuclear reactors are sealed inside a very powerfully built structure called the "containment." Under ordinary circumstances the containment would prevent the escape of radioactivity even if the reactor fuel were to melt completely and escape from the reactor vessel. A typical containment is constructed of 3-foot-thick concrete walls heavily reinforced by thick steel rods welded into a tight net around which the concrete is poured...

The containment provides a broad range of protection for the reactor against external forces, such as a tornado hurling an automobile, a tree, or a house against it, an airplane flying into it, or a large charge of chemical explosive detonated against it. In a meltdown accident, however, the function of the containment is to hold the radioactive material inside. Actually, it need only do this for several hours, because there are systems inside the containment for removing the radioactivity from the atmosphere. One type blows the air through filters in an operation similar in principle to that of household vacuum cleaners. In another, water sprinklers remove the dust from the air. There are charcoal filter beds or chemical sprays for removing certain types of airborne radioactivity. Most radioactive materials, however, would simply get stuck to the walls of the building and the equipment inside, and thereby be removed from the air. Thus, if the containment holds even for several hours, the health consequences of a meltdown would be greatly mitigated. In the Three Mile Island accident, there was no threat to the containment. The investigations have therefore concluded that even if there had been a complete meltdown and the molten fuel had escaped from the reactor, the containment would very probably have prevented the escape of any large amount of radioactivity. In other words, even if the Three Mile Island accident was a "near miss" to a complete meltdown (a highly debatable point), it was definitely not a near miss to a health disaster.

The Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment anything like those used in U.S. reactors. Analyses have shown, that if it had used one, virtually no radioactivity would have escaped, there would have been no threat to human health, and the world would probably have never heard about it.

Roads to Meltdown

In order to understand the meltdown accident, we must go back to its origins. A nuclear power reactor is basically just a water heater, evolving heat from fission processes in the fuel. This heats the water surrounding the fuel, and the hot water is used to produce steam. The steam is then employed as in coal- or oil-fired power plants to drive a turbine which turns a generator (sometimes called a "dynamo") which produces electric power. There are two different types of reactors in widespread use in the United States, pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and boiling water reactors (BWRs). In the PWR, the heated water is pumped out of the reactor to separate units called "steam generators," where the heat in this water is used to produce steam. In the BWR, the steam is produced directly in the reactor so there is no need for a steam generator.

There are features of the nuclear water heater that differentiate it from water heaters in our basements or the coal- or oil-fired boilers that produce steam for various purposes in industrial plants. First, the waste products from the burning do not go up a chimney or settle to the bottom as an ash, but rather are retained inside the fuel. Nuclear fuel does not crumble into ashes or get converted into a gas when burned, as do coal and oil fuels. Second, these waste products are radioactive, which means that they emit radiation. Third, because of their radioactivity, these wastes continue to heat the fuel even after the reactor is shut down; it is therefore necessary to continue to provide some water to carry this heat away.

If, for some reason, no water is available to remove this heat (called a loss-of-coolant accident, LOCA), the fuel will heat up and eventually melt. Fuel melting releases the radioactivity sealed inside. Some of this radioactivity would come off as airborne dust that has a potential for damaging public health if it is released into the environment. If there is some water in the reactor but not enough, the situation may be even worse, because steam reacts chemically with the fuel-casing material (an alloy of zirconium) at high temperature (2,700°F), releasing hydrogen, an inflammable and potentially explosive gas, and providing additional heat, thereby accelerating the fuel-melting process.

In the Three Mile Island accident, the LOCA occurred as a result of a valve failing to close, while the operators were led to believe that it was closed; they had misinterpreted the information available to them from instrument readings. According to one estimate, a complete fuel meltdown might have occurred if the water had continued to escape through the open valve for another 30 to 60 minutes.

How close was Three Mile Island to such a complete meltdown? There were many unusual aspects to the instrument readings at the time. Clearly, something very strange was going on. A number of knowledgeable people were trying to figure out what to do. One rightfully suggested closing an auxiliary valve in the pipe through which water was escaping. Within less than a minute after it was closed, a telephone call came in from another expert working at home suggesting that this auxiliary valve be closed, so it cannot be claimed that a meltdown was prevented by the luck of one man's recognizing the right thing to do. It is difficult to prove that if neither of the two had thought of closing the valve someone else would have, but there were a lot of people involved in analyzing the information, and there would have been further clues developing before a meltdown would have occurred. Some analyses indicate that there would not have been a complete meltdown even if the valve had not been closed, as there was a small amount of water still being pumped in.

In any case, the widely publicized statement that the Three Mile Island accident came within 30 to 60 minutes of a meltdown seemed to be sufficient to scare the public. I often wonder why this is so — when we drive on a high-speed highway, on every curve we are within a few seconds of being killed if nothing is done — that is, if the steering wheel is not turned at the proper time. And don't forget that even if a meltdown had occurred, there very probably would have been no health consequences, since the radioactivity would have been contained.

As a result of the Three Mile Island accident great improvements have been made in instrumentation, information availability to the operators, and operator training. There is now a requirement that a graduate engineer be on hand at all times. There will probably never again be a LOCA arising from faulty interpretation of instrument readings.

The Probabilities

In considering the hazards of a reactor meltdown accident, once again we find ourselves involved in a game of chance governed by the laws of probability. By setting up additional lines of defense, or by improving the ones we now have, we can reduce the probability of a major accident, but we can never reduce it to zero. This should not necessarily be discomforting since we already are engaged in innumerable other games of chance with disastrous consequences if we lose — natural phenomena like earthquakes and disease epidemics, and manmade threats like toxic chemical releases and dam failures, to name a few. In fact, participating in this new game of chance may save us from participating in others brought on by alternative actions, and it may therefore reduce our total risk: building a nuclear power plant may remove the need for a hydroelectric dam whose failure can cause a disaster, or for a coal-burning power plant whose air pollution might be disastrous. The important question is: what is the probability of a disastrous meltdown accident?

Several studies have been undertaken to answer this question. The best known of these was sponsored by the NRC and directed by Dr. Norman Rasmussen, an MIT professor.³ It extended over several years, involved many dozens of scientists and engineers, and cost over $4 million before its final report was issued in 1975. The report bore document designation "WASH-1400" and was titled "Reactor Safety Study" (RSS). It was a probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) based on a method known as "fault tree analysis," which had been developed to evaluate safety problems in the aerospace industry.

One interesting new development has been abandonment of the word meltdown, largely replaced by core damage. In the early thinking about reactor accidents, the idea became prevalent that if any appreciable fuel melting would occur, the problem would continue to escalate until all of the fuel became a molten mass with an unstoppable internal heat source (the radioactivity). Hence it would melt its way through the reactor vessel and anything else that got in its way — down through the Earth and all the way to China was the picturesque exaggeration that led to the name "China Syndrome." More detailed studies showed that these ideas were grossly oversimplified, and the Three Mile Island accident was a clear counterexample — most of the fuel melted, but it did not even get out of the reactor vessel. It is even difficult to answer the question "Was the Three Mile Island accident a meltdown?" because that word is not clearly defined. "Core damage," on the other hand, allows discussion of the wide variety of circumstances that are now believed to be possible. It also allows consideration of the several "precursors" to core damage that have already been experienced in reactor operation. By noting what further failures could have caused these incidents to escalate into core damage and estimating the probabilities for these further failures, one can arrive at an independent estimate of the probability for a core damage accident. The results of the new PRAs are discussed in some detail in the Chapter 6 Appendix. There are many differences between these and the RSS, but when all is said and done, the bottom lines turn out to be quite similar. It is therefore not unreasonable to use the RSS results. There is a big advantage in doing so since the RSS gives many more details that are useful in the discussion. We therefore base the following discussion on the RSS.

The RSS estimates that a reactor meltdown may be expected about once every 20,000 years of reactor operation; that is , if there were 100 reactors, there would be a meltdown once in 200 years. The report by the principal organization opposed to nuclear power, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS),⁴ estimates one meltdown for every 2,000 years of reactor operation. In U.S.-type reactors, there have been over 2,000 years of commercial reactor operation worldwide plus almost 4,000 years of U.S. Navy reactor operation all without a meltdown (in the sense they are using the word). If the UCS estimate is correct, we should have expected three meltdowns by now, whereas according to the RSS, there is a 30% chance that we would have had one.

We now turn to the consequences of a meltdown. Since it gives more detail, we will quote the results of the RSS here; the UCS viewpoint can be roughly interpreted as multiplying all consequences by a factor of 10.

In most meltdowns the containment is expected to maintain its integrity for a long time, so the number of fatalities should be zero. In 1 out of 5 meltdowns there would be over 1,000 deaths, in 1 out of 100 there would be over 10,000 deaths, and in 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns, we would approach 50,000 deaths (the number we get each year from motor vehicle accidents). Considering all types, we expect an average of 400 fatalities per meltdown; the UCS estimate is 5,000. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 30,000 deaths each year in the United States (see Chapter 3), for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning there would have to be 75 meltdowns per year (30,000 / 400 = 75), or 1 meltdown every 5 days somewhere in the United States, according to the RSS; according to UCS, there would have to be a meltdown every 2 months. Since there has never been a single meltdown, clearly we cannot expect one nearly that often.

It is often argued that the deaths from air pollution are not very alarming because they are not detectable, and we cannot associate any particular deaths with coal burning. But the same is true of the vast majority of deaths from nuclear reactor accidents. They would materialize only as slight increases of the cancer rate in a large population. Even in the worst accident considered in the RSS, expected only once in 100,000 meltdowns, the 45,000 cancer deaths would occur among a population of about 10 million, with each individual's risk being increased by 0.5%. Typically, this would increase a person's risk of dying from cancer from 20.0% to 20.5%. This risk varies much more than that from state to state — 17.5% in Colorado and New Mexico, 19% in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas, 22% in New York, and 24% in Connecticut and Rhode Island — and these variations are rarely, if ever, noticed. It is thus reasonable to assume that the additional cancer risks, even to those involved in this most serious meltdown accident considered in the RSS, would never be noticed.

If we are interested in detectable deaths that can be attributed to an accident, we must limit our consideration to acute radiation sickness, which can be induced by very high radiation doses, about a half million millirems in one day resulting in death within a month. This is a rather rare disease: there were three deaths due to it in the early years among workers in U.S. government nuclear programs, but there have been none for over 25 years now.

According to the RSS, there would be no detectable deaths in 98 out of 100 meltdowns, there would be over 100 such deaths in one out of 500 meltdowns, over 1,000 in one out of 5,000 meltdowns, and in one out of 100,000 meltdowns there would be about 3,500 detectable fatalities.

The largest number of detectable fatalities to date from an energy-related incident was an air pollution episode in London in 1952 in which 3,500 deaths directly attributable to the pollution occurred within a few days.⁵ Thus, with regard to detectable fatalities, the equivalent of the worst nuclear accident considered in the RSS — expected once in 100,000 meltdowns — has already occurred with coal burning.

But the nuclear accidents we have been discussing are hypothetical, and if we want to consider hypothetical accidents, very high consequences are not difficult to find. For example there are at least two hydroelectric dams in the United States whose sudden rupture would kill over 200,000 people. There are hypothetical explosions of liquefied natural gas that can wipe out a whole city. If we get into possibilities of incubating or spreading germs, or of subtle chemical effects, we can easily imagine even more devastating scenarios arising due to air pollution from coal or oil burning plants.

It is sometimes said that nuclear accidents may be extremely rare, but when they occur they are so devastating as to make the whole technology unacceptable. From the above comparisons it is clear that this argument holds no water. For another perspective, we embrace a technology that kills 50,000 Americans every year. Every one of these deaths is clearly detectable, and that technology seriously injures more than 10 times that many. I refer here to motor vehicles. Even if we had a meltdown every 10 years, a nuclear power accident would kill that many only once in a million years.

- Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
  The The Fearsome Reactor Meltdown Accident
  Excerpt from his book: THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION

References:
1. "Report of the President's Commission on The Accident at Three Mile Island," J. B. Kemeny (Chairman), Washington, D.C., October (1979).
2. M. Rogovin (Director), "Three Mile Island, A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public," Washington, D.C., January (1980).
3. "Reactor Safety Study," Nuclear Regulatory Commission Document WASH-1400, NUREG 75/014 (1975).
4. Union of Concerned Scientists, "The Risks of Nuclear Power Reactors," Cambridge, Massachusetts (1977).
5. R. Wilson, S. D. Colome, J. D. Spengler, and D. G. Wilson, Health Effects of Fossil Fuel Burning. (Ballinger, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980).

THE CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT — CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?
Again, Professor Bernard L. Cohen provides us with an in-depth answer.

It is very difficult to predict the future of scientific developments, and few would even dare to make predictions extending beyond the next 50 years. However, based on everything we know now, one can make a strong case for the thesis that nuclear fission reactors will be providing a large fraction of our energy needs for the next million years. If that should come to pass, a history of energy production written at that remote date may well record that the worst reactor accident of all time occurred at Chernobyl, USSR, in April of 1986.

In that accident, a substantial fraction of all of the radioactivity in the reactor was dispersed into the environment as airborne dust — its most dangerous form. It is difficult to imagine how anything worse could happen to a reactor from the standpoint of harming the public outside.

In the wake of the Chernobyl accident, the primary question on American minds was — can it happen here? Let us try to answer that question.

We have just seen how extremely improbable an accident of that magnitude should be. But if it is so extremely improbable, how could it have happened so early in the history of nuclear power? The response to that question is that there are very major differences between the Chernobyl reactor and the American reactors on which our previous discussion was based.

In order to understand these differences, we must delve much deeper into the details of how reactors work. This discussion may also be useful to those with an interest in the basic science behind nuclear power.

HOW NUCLEAR REACTORS WORK

In an ordinary furnace, energy is produced in the form of heat by chemical reactions between the fuel and oxygen in the air. A chemical reaction is actually a collision between atoms in which their orbiting electrons interact. The other constituent of an atom is the nucleus. If two nuclei collide and interact we have a nuclear reaction. However, unlike atoms, which are electrically neutral, nuclei have a positive electric charge and therefore strongly repel one another. Hence nuclear reactions do not normally occur in our familiar world.

An exception to this situation is the neutron, one of the two constituents of nuclei (the other is the proton), which does not have an electric charge. It can therefore approach a nucleus without being repelled and induce a nuclear reaction. Because this happens so easily, a neutron can move about freely for only about 0.0001 seconds before it collides with a nucleus and becomes involved in a nuclear reaction. Since free neutrons last for such a short time, they must be produced as they are used. Neutrons can only be produced in nuclear reactions, so what is needed is a nuclear reaction induced by a neutron which releases more than one neutron. These can then induce further reactions which produce more neutrons, and so forth, in a self-sustaining chain reaction. Such a reaction is available in the interaction of a neutron with a uranium-235 (U-235) nucleus. This is the basis for a nuclear reactor.

When a U-235 nucleus is struck by a neutron, it often splits into two nuclei of roughly half the size and mass in a process called "fission." Since all nuclei have a positive electrical charge, these two newly formed nuclei repel one another very strongly. As a result they end up traveling in opposite directions at very high speeds, which means that their motion contains lots of energy. As they travel through the surrounding material, whatever it may be, they strike other atoms, giving them some of their energy, until, after about a million such collisions over a few thousandths of an inch of travel, all of their energy is dissipated, and they come to rest. The atoms they strike or their orbiting electrons are given additional motion and have collisions with other atoms, sharing their energy with them. By these processes, the energy released in the fission process is eventually shared by all of the atoms in the vicinity. It increases the speed of their normal random motion and our senses interpret this as increased temperature. Thus, the fission reaction releases heat, 50 million times as much heat as is released in the chemical reaction between a carbon atom from coal and oxygen atoms from the air in the coal-burning process. The purpose of a nuclear power plant is to convert this heat into electricity, as we described in Chapter 6.

The two original fragments from the fission process also have a substantial excess of internal energy which they largely dissipate by shooting off neutrons, typically two or three neutrons from each fission reaction. It is these neutrons that sustain the chain reaction. In order for it to be self-sustaining, at least one of them must strike another U-235 nucleus and cause a fission reaction. Some neutrons get past the surrounding U-235 and are lost to the process. If enough neutrons are lost, the chain reaction will stop. These losses are reduced as the thickness of the U-235 that the neutron must traverse increases. This means that for the chain reaction to be self-sustaining, there must by some minimum amount of U-235. This is called the critical mass. To generate energy, one need only assemble a critical mass of U-235, which is about the size of a cantaloupe, and introduce a few neutrons to start the process. There are simple and readily available ways of providing these start-up neutrons.

But where do we get the U-235? Uranium occurs in nature as a mixture of 99.3% uranium-238 (U-238) with 0.7% U-235. When a neutron strikes U-238, that nucleus does not undergo fission. If we assemble a large mass of natural uranium, we do not get a self-sustaining chain reaction because the great majority of neutrons are lost by striking U-238 nuclei. As one possible solution to this problem we can separate the U-235 out of natural uranium; we do this for making bombs, but it is a very difficult and expensive process.

However, an alternative and much better approach is available. If the neutrons can be slowed down to very low speeds — one ten-thousandth of the velocity with which they originally emerge — due to the quirks of quantum physics, their inherent probability for striking a U-235 nucleus becomes 200 times greater than for striking a U-238 nucleus. In this situation, even with natural uranium most neutrons would strike U-235 nuclei, and we could get a chain reaction.

The method for slowing down neutrons is to arrange for them to strike and bounce off lightweight nuclei, giving the struck nuclei some of their energy. Materials introduced for this purpose are called "moderators" since they moderate the speed of the neutrons. When a neutron strikes any nucleus, there is some chance that it will be absorbed, but the probability varies by large factors for different nuclei. Since we cannot afford to lose many neutrons, a moderator is only suitable if it has a low probability for neutron absorption. This leaves very few options. One of these is very high purity carbon in the form of graphite. It is such a good moderator that natural uranium dispersed in very high purity graphite can provide a chain reaction. That is how the first chain reaction was achieved in the famous experiments directed by Enrico Fermi under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium in 1942. (That reactor may be seen at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.) Another possible candidate for a moderator is ordinary water, but its propensity for capturing neutrons is not as low as one would like. A chain reaction cannot be achieved from a mixture of natural uranium and water. (Actually, this is fortunate because if it could be achieved, reactors would be very easy to make and Hitler would have had nuclear bombs during World War II.) However, if the uranium is enriched in U-235 up to 3% (from its normal 0.7%), then water becomes a good moderator. It turns out that providing this relatively low enrichment is not prohibitively expensive.

One further problem in operating a reactor is controlling the rate at which the chain reaction proceeds, which determines the rate at which heat is produced. This is done with "control rods", rods made of a material which strongly absorbs neutrons. Pushing control rods in absorbs more neutrons to slow down the chain reaction, while pulling them out allows more neutrons to strike uranium nuclei, which speeds up the chain reaction.

U.S. REACTORS versus CHERNOBYL-TYPE REACTORS

From the foregoing discussion, we see that two of the principal options for reactor design are:

1. Uranium fuel enriched to 3% in U-235 surrounded by water moderator; this is the option used in all U.S. power reactors.
2. Natural (or slightly enriched) uranium surrounded by graphite moderator; this is the option used in Chernobyl-type reactors.

Since the heat is generated in the uranium fuel, there is still the problem of transferring this heat out of the reactor to make the steam which drives the turbine to produce electricity. This is done efficiently by circulating water as in the case of cooling an automobile engine, but on a much grander scale. Option 1 thus becomes a configuration of fuel rods in a large water-filled vessel with water being rapidly pumped through. That is what is done in all U.S. reactors. Option 2, which is used in Chernobyl-type reactors, consists of a large block of graphite with holes in it containing tubes; these tubes have fuel rods inside of them, and water flows rapidly through the tubes to remove the heat. This water provides no benefit as a moderator since the graphite takes care of that function. On the other hand, the water does capture neutrons, reducing the number of neutrons available for striking uranium atoms. The net effect of the water on the chain reaction is, therefore, negative, tending to slow it down. Materials that act in this way are called "poisons," since they tend to destroy, or poison, the chain reaction. In a Chernobyl-type reactor, the water acts as a "poison." There are some important safety advantages to option 1 which is the U.S. approach. If, due to an accident, the water should be lost, the chain reaction automatically stops — there can be no chain reaction without the moderator. However, in option 2, the Chernobyl design, the graphite moderator is still there, and loss of water means loss of a "poison." Losing a poison speeds up the chain reaction. This generates additional heat at a time when the mechanism for removing the heat — the water — is gone. This can be a very dangerous situation.

Another safety advantage of the U.S. approach is that if, for any reason, the chain reaction speeds up, releasing more energy and thus causing the temperature to rise, the water acts as a buffer. The increased temperature will cause more boiling. This will reduce the amount of moderator, which will slow down the chain reaction and thereby reduce the temperature. The reactor is, therefore, stable against a temperature change; that is, an increase in temperature automatically causes things to happen which will reduce the temperature. No human action or equipment failure can interfere with this natural process.

In a Chernobyl-type reactor, on the other hand, an increase in the speed of the chain reaction causes the temperature to increase, which causes more water boiling. This reduces the amount of "poison," which causes the chain reaction to accelerate and increases the temperature even further. This process, therefore, tends to make the reactor unstable against a temperature change; an increase in temperature automatically causes things to happen which lead to further increases in the temperature. Something must be done by some person or equipment to prevent the situation from escalating to a disaster. Actually, under normal operating conditions, other factors would contribute to overcome this instability, but in low-power operation, where the infamous accident occurred, this instability represented an extremely dangerous safety problem.

With these two very clear safety advantages for the U.S.-type reactors, one might ask why anyone would build a Chernobyl-type reactor. The reason is that Chernobyl-type reactors are designed to produce plutonium for bombs while they generate electricity. This type of reactor has two big advantages for this application.1 One is that the quantity of plutonium produced varies inversely with the ratio of U-238 to U-235, which means that much more plutonium is produced in Chernobyl-type reactors than in U.S. reactors. The other is that in producing plutonium for bombs, it is important that the fuel be left in the reactor no more than 30 days, and a Chernobyl-type reactor is much better adapted for that purpose.

In a U.S. reactor, all of the fuel is inside a single large vessel, and it is a major effort, requiring about a month's time, to shut down the reactor, open the vessel, and change the fuel. Therefore, this operation is undertaken no more than once a year, which makes these reactors unsuitable for producing weapons-grade plutonium. In a Chernobyl-type reactor, each of the 1,700 fuel rods is enclosed in a single tube through which the water flows. It is relatively easy to open one of these tubes at a time, change the fuel rod, and replace it, without having to shut down the reactor. This makes these reactors excellent facilities for producing bomb-grade plutonium as they generate electricity. In fact, some of the U.S. government reactors designed only to produce plutonium for bombs are somewhat like the Chernobyl-type reactor. After the Chernobyl accident, there were serious questions raised about safety hazards in these U.S. production reactors, but it was eventually concluded that they contain design features that assure their safety.

However, there is one further price in safety that must be paid for the capability to change fuel easily. The fuel-changing operation requires a lot of space and activity by operators. This makes it impractical to enclose the reactor in the type of containment used for U. S. reactors (as described in Chapter 6). The containment used in a Chernobyl-type reactor is designed only to protect against rupture of one of the 1,700 tubes, rather than against a major accident that may rupture hundreds of tubes. All of the added safety obtained from containments in U.S. reactors was, therefore, not available at Chernobyl. In fact, post accident analyses indicate that if there had been a U.S.-style containment, none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths.

- Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
  The The Chernobyl Accident - Can It Happen Here?
  Excerpt from his book: THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION

OK, U.S. nuclear power plants are safe, but what about nuclear radiation from the nuclear waste produced by the power plants? Do we risk Death, Cancer, radiation sickness, and genetic mutation from exposure to the nuclear waste?

Jerry J. Cohen of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answers our question:
"Stated succinctly, the potential hazard of nuclear waste is no greater than that of many other commonly accepted industrial activities in today's world and the concern related to its longevity (half-life) is absurd when compared to current levels of concern related to use of stable toxic elements (e.g., lead, cadmium, mercury) which last forever.

"The major concerns related to nuclear waste management can be expressed in terms of hazard and longevity. These concerns may be paraphrased as follows:

First, waste is extremely toxic. The radioactive waste from a single nuclear reactor is enough to poison the entire population of the world several times over. It could cause malignancy and other diseases to exposed populations and genetic defects to their descendants.

Second, because of the extremely long half-life of plutonium and some of the other components, its toxicity will persist for thousands, and perhaps millions of years.

"Both of these statements are true. However, when viewed in a different perspective, they lose their specter of severity. For example, a valid analogy to the first statement would be the observation that considering such items as cleaning compounds, pesticides, and other chemicals, there is enough toxic material in the average supermarket or hardware store to poison everyone in the community, if not the entire state. The problem has been one of confusing toxicity with hazard. The mere existence of a toxic substance does not constitute a hazard, unless that substance is readily available for dissemination and assimilation in the human body.

"Consider, for example, that the lead used in the manufacture of automobile batteries in this country each year is also sufficient, if properly distributed, to poison the entire world population several times over. Although long half-lived radionuclides in radioactive waste may persist for centuries or millennia, lead, being a stable element, will exist forever. In addition, lead is also a carcinogen and a mutagen. Nevertheless, lead in automobile batteries is not generally considered to be a serious environmental threat, simply because of its low availability for human assimilation. The annual production of lead in this country, if administered by ingestion, would be sufficient to kill far more people than the annual amount of plutonium produced under the most ambitious nuclear power production program conceivable.
–Excerpt taken from: Nuclear Waste Disposal: the Nature of the Problem, By Jerry J. Cohen, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Retired.
size: 130Kb

Nuclear radiation from spent nuclear fuel is toxic and can be the source of a lethal dose of radiation or eventually cancer from a milder dose, if you are exposed directly to the radiation. The same is true of many chemicals and heavy metals like lead and mercury, which can also cause genetic mutations.

I was surprised to hear a young man who has a biology degree from a major university tell me that nuclear waste is the most toxic substance on earth. He was afraid of nuclear energy. He obviously had not inquired into the subject — he merely recited the anti-nuclear propaganda without questioning or bothering to talk to a nuclear scientist. The fact that thousands of other chemicals and metals are also extremely toxic does not make nuclear radiation less dangerous — but an exaggerated fear of nuclear radiation while showing little concern for the other equally toxic substances that exist within and around our communities is what makes the fear of nuclear energy irrational.

HOW DANGEROUS IS RADIATION? Read what Professor Bernard L. Cohen has to say about radiation.

The most important breakdown in the public's understanding of nuclear power is in its concept of the dangers of radiation. What is radiation, and how dangerous is it?

Radiation consists of several types of subatomic particles, principally those called gamma rays, neutrons, electrons, and alpha particles, that shoot through space at very high speeds, something like 100,000 miles per second. They can easily penetrate deep inside the human body, damaging some of the biological cells of which the body is composed. This damage can cause a fatal cancer to develop, or if it occurs in reproductive cells, it can cause genetic defects in later generations of offspring. When explained in this way, the dangers of radiation seem to be very grave, and for a person to be struck by a particle of radiation appears to be an extremely serious event. So it would also seem from the following description in what has perhaps been the most influential book from the opponents of nuclear energy¹:

When one of these particles or rays goes crashing through some material, it collides violently with atoms or molecules along the way... In the delicately balanced economy of the cell, this sudden disruption can be disastrous. The individual cell may die; it may recover. But if it does recover, after the passage of weeks, months or years, it may begin to proliferate wildly in the uncontrolled growth we call cancer.

But before we shed too many tears for the poor fellow who was struck by one of these particles of radiation, it should be pointed out that every person in the world is struck by about 15,000 of these particles of radiation every second of his or her life, and this is true for every person who has ever lived and for every person who ever will live. These particles, totalling 500 billion per year, or 40 trillion in a lifetime, are from natural sources. In addition, our technology has introduced new sources of radiation like medical X-rays — a typical X-ray bombards us with over a trillion particles of radiation.

With all of this radiation exposure, how come we're not all dying of cancer? The answer to that question is not that it takes a very large number of these particles to cause a cancer. As far as we know, every single one of them has that potential; as we are frequently told, "no level of radiation is perfectly safe." What saves us, rather, is that the probability for one of these particles to cause cancer is very low, about 1 chance in 30 quadrillion (30 million billion, or 30,000,000,000,000,000)! Every time a particle of radiation strikes us, we engage in a fatal game of chance at those odds. However, this is not unique to radiation; we are engaged in innumerable similar games of chance involving chemical, physical, and biological processes that may lead to any form of human malady, and the one involving radiation has odds much more favorable to us than most. Only about 1% of fatal human cancers are caused by the 30 trillion particles of radiation that hit us over a lifetime (this estimate does not include the effects of radon, to be discussed below), while the other 99% are from losing in one of these other games of chance.

Of course every extra particle that strikes us increases our cancer risk, so many people feel that they should go to great lengths to avoid extra radiation. If that is your attitude, there are many things you can do. You can reduce it 10% by living in a wood house rather than a brick or stone house, because brick and stone contain more radioactive materials like uranium, thorium, and potassium. You could reduce it 20% by building a thick lead shield around your bed to reduce the number of hits while you sleep, or you could cut it in half by wearing clothing lined with lead like the cover dentists drape over you when they take X-rays.

But most people don't bother with these things. Rather, they recognize that life is full of risks. Every time you take a bite of food, it may have a chemical that will initiate a cancer, but still people go on eating, more than necessary in most cases. Every ride or walk we take could end in a fatal accident, but that doesn't keep us from riding or walking. Similarly, the sensible attitude most of us take is not to worry about a little extra radiation; after all, 1 chance in 30 quadrillion is pretty good odds!

The moral of the this story is that hazards of radiation must be treated quantitatively. If we stick to qualitative reasoning alone, we can easily conclude that nuclear power is bad — it leads to radiation exposure which can cause cancer. The trouble with this is that, by a similar type of qualitative reasoning, just about anything else we do can be shown to be harmful: coal or oil burning causes air pollution which kills people, so coal or oil burning is bad; using natural gas leads to explosions which kill people, so burning gas is bad; and so on. Any discussion of dangers from radiation must include numbers; otherwise, it can be as completely deceptive as the quote above about the tragedy of being struck by a single particle of radiation. But how often do stories we hear about radiation include numbers?

THE MEDIA AND RADIATION

We now turn to the question of why the public became so irrationally fearful of radiation. Probably the most important reason is the gross overcoverage of radiation stories by television, magazines, and newspapers. Constantly hearing stories about radiation as a hazard gave people the subconscious impression that it was something to worry about. In attempting to document this overcoverage, I obtained the number of entries in the New York Times Information Bank on various types of accidents and compared them with the number of fatalities per year caused by these accidents in the United States. I did this for the years 1974-1978 so as not to include the Three Mile Island accident, which generated more stories than usual. On an average, there were 120 entries per year on motor vehicle accidents, which kill 50,000 Americans each year; 50 entries per year on industrial accidents, which kill 12,000; and 20 entries per year on asphyxiation accidents, which kill 4,500; note that for these the number of entries, which represents roughly the amount of newspaper coverage, is approximately proportional to the death toll they cause. But for accidents involving radiation, there were something like 200 entries per year, in spite of there not having been a single fatality from a radiation accident for over a decade.

Another problem, especially in TV coverage, was use of inflammatory language. We often heard about "deadly radiation" or "lethal radioactivity," referring to a hazard that hadn't claimed a single victim for over a decade, and had caused less than five deaths in American history. But we never heard about "lethal electricity," although 1,200 Americans were dying each year from electrocution; or about "lethal natural gas," which was killing 500 annually with asphyxiation accidents.

A more important problem with TV stories about radiation was that they never quantified the risk. I can understand their not giving doses in millirem — that may have been too technical for their audience — but they could have easily compared exposures with natural radiation or medical X-rays. In the 1982 accident at the Rochester power plant, which was the top story on the network evening news for two days, wouldn't it have been useful to tell the public that no one received as much exposure from that accident as he or she was receiving every day from natural sources? This is not a new suggestion; similar comparisons had consistently been made by scientists for 35 years in information booklets, magazine articles, and interviews, but the TV people never used them.

Another reason for public misunderstanding of radiation was that the television reports portrayed it as something very new and highly mysterious. There is, of course, nothing new about radiation because natural radioactivity has always been present on Earth, showering humans with hundreds of times more radiation than they can ever expect to get from the nuclear power industry. The "mystery" label was equally unwarranted. As mentioned earlier, radiation effects are much better understood by scientists than those of air pollution, food additives, chemical pollutants in water, or just about any other agent of environmental concern. There are several reasons for this. Radiation is basically a much simpler phenomenon, with simple and well-understood mechanisms for interacting with matter, whereas air pollution and the others may have dozens or even hundreds of important components interacting in complex and poorly understood ways. Radiation is easy to measure and quantify, with relatively cheap and reliable instruments providing highly sensitive and accurate data, whereas instruments for measuring other environmental agents are generally rather expensive, often erratic in behavior, and relatively insensitive. And finally our knowledge of radiation health effects benefits from a $2 billion research effort extending over 50 years. More important than the total amount of money is the fact that research funding for radiation health effects has been fairly stable, thereby attracting good scientists to the field, allowing several successive generations of graduate students to be trained and excellent laboratory facilities to be developed.

It was my impression that TV people considered the official committees of scientific experts to be tools of the nuclear industry rather than objective experts. The facts don't support that attitude. The National Academy of Sciences is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1863 to further knowledge and advise the government. It is composed of about a thousand of our nation's most distinguished researchers from all branches of science...

To believe that such highly reputable scientists conspired to practice deceit seems absurd, if for no other reason than that it would be easy to prove that they had done so and the consequences to their scientific careers would be devastating. All of them had such reputations that they could easily obtain a variety of excellent and well-paying academic positions independent of government or industry financing, so they were not vulnerable to economic pressures.

But above all, they are human beings who have chosen careers in a field dedicated to protection of the health of their fellow human beings; in fact, many of them are M.D.'s who have foregone financially lucrative careers in medical practice to become research scientists. To believe that nearly all of these scientists were somehow involved in a sinister plot to deceive the public indeed challenges the imagination.

For those who can't understand why television excessively covered and distorted information about the hazards of radiation, I believe it was because their primary concern is entertainment rather than education. One point in the ratings for the network evening news is worth $11 million per year in advertising revenue. In that atmosphere, what would happen to a TV producer who decided to concentrate on properly educating the public rather than entertaining it? As an illustration of the low priority the networks place on their educational function, I doubt if there are more than one or two Ph.D. level scientists in the full-time employ of any television network, in spite of the fact that they are the primary source of science education for the public. Even a strictly liberal arts college with no interest in training scientists typically has one Ph.D.-level scientist for every 200 students, whereas the networks have practically none for their 200 million students.

If TV producers took their role of educating the public seriously, they would have considered it their function to transmit scientific information from the scientific community to the public. But this they didn't do. They wanted to decide what to transmit, which means that they made judgments on scientific issues. When I brought this to their attention, they always said that the scientific community was split on the issue of dangers from radiation. By "split" they seemed to mean that there was at least one scientist disagreeing with the others. They didn't seem to recognize that a unanimous conclusion of a National Academy of Sciences Committee should be given more weight than the opinion of one individual scientist who is far outside the mainstream. Their position was that, since the scientific community was split, they had no way to find out what the scientific consensus was. To this I always proposed a simple solution: pick a few major universities of their choice, call and ask the operator for the department chairman or a professor in the field, and ask the question; after five such calls the consensus would be clear on almost any question, usually 5 to 0. The TV people never were willing to do this. My strong impression was that they weren't really interested in what scientists had concluded. They were only after a story that would arouse viewer interest. Clearly, a scare story about the dangers of radiation serves this purpose best.

- Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
   How Dangerous is Radiation?
  Excerpt from his book: THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION

References:
1. S. Novick, The Careless Atom (Dell Publishing, New York, 1969), p. 105.

Jerry J. Cohen has more to add:
“…Nearly everyone agrees privately that safe disposal of spent fuel or other high-level radioactive material is not a technical problem, but a political one… If one accepts the view apparently held by the majority of scientists working in the nuclear waste field that public apprehension regarding the problem is grossly exaggerated, then it is reasonable to ask how this condition came to exist. How did the myth evolve? …the public has been rational. Their fears and apprehensions are understandable, given the information available to them.

"In ancient times, myths (beliefs not necessarily based upon fact) became embedded in the folklore of a culture over long periods of time by passing from generation to generation. Often such myths were embellished and amplified with each passage. Laws and rules governing society, such as the witchcraft laws in colonial America, were predicated on such beliefs since they came to be regarded as fundamental truths. Today, in the age of mass communication, myths can become established far more quickly. The advent of science during the last few centuries may have had a mitigating effect on adherence to mythology, particularly in modem societies, but this is by no means always the case. The folklore regarding nuclear waste presents a particular case in point where beliefs, not supported by science and logic, have played a major role in the development of our policies, rules and laws.”
–Excerpt taken from: Nuclear Waste Disposal: the Nature of the Problem, By Jerry J. Cohen, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Retired.
size: 130Kb

The first time I read something about the volume of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear power plant, I could not believe what I was reading. The author wrote: "One thing I was always concerned about was Nuclear waste, until I learned that if I lived to the age of 80 and all the energy I ever used in my lifetime came from Nuclear energy, that I would have created a golf-ball sized piece of waste. When taken with the consideration of the pollutants that fossil fuels create, this seemed insignificant to me..."

I asked a nuclear engineer, who specializes in mathematical calculations involving uranium fuel and spent nuclear fuel storage, to tell me if the golf-ball size piece of waste was true. He performed the calculations and concluded that it would be closer to the size of a soft-ball. Eighty years worth of energy! I don’t care if it is the size of a basketball. A life-time of energy and all I have to worry about is containment of a very small amount of highly toxic material. I don’t think that is too much of a challenge for modern engineering.

Read the following insights from Richard Rhodes and Dr. Denis Beller:
“The great advantage of nuclear power is its ability to wrest enormous energy from a small volume of fuel. Nuclear fission, transforming matter directly to energy is several million times as energetic as chemical burning, which merely breaks chemical bonds. One ton of nuclear fuel produces energy equivalent to 2 to 3 million tons of fossil fuel… Running a 1000 mega-watt (a continuous one million kilowatt) power plant for a year requires 2000 train cars of coal or 10 supertankers of oil but only 12 cubic meters of natural uranium… The spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste requiring disposal after one year would be about 20 cubic meters in all when compacted (roughly, the volume of two automobiles)… The high-level waste is intensely radioactive, of course… But thanks to its small volume and the fact that it is not released into the environment, this high-level waste can be meticulously sequestered behind multiple barriers. Waste from coal, dispersed across the landscape in smoke or buried near the surface, remains toxic forever. Radioactive nuclear waste decays steadily, losing 99% of its toxicity after 600 years – well within the range of human experience… Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem in the United States because of widespread fear disproportionate to the reality of risk. But it is not an engineering problem.”
- Excerpt from: The Need For Nuclear Power, by Richard Rhodes and Denis Beller

Containment — is the keyword required for a rational understanding of the dangers of nuclear radiation from spent nuclear fuel. The volume (the size) of the substance to be contained plays a very important role in how successful the containment is likely to be. The smaller the volume, the easier it will be to contain. It doesn’t matter how toxic a substance is; as long as the substance is contained so that it cannot escape into the environment, or come into contact with people.

Nuclear Literacy:
Radiation Risk
Spent Nuclear Fuel
The Virtual Nuclear Tourist
Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative
Nuclear Waste Perspectives
Biological Effects of Radiation
THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION by Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh
Dispelling Myths About Nuclear Energy
Dry Cask Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel
Nuclear Power Comparisons and Perspective
U.N. report fuels Chernobyl radiation debate
Spent Fuel is too valuable to be Nuclear Waste
How Much Nuclear Waste is in the United States?
The Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
The Accident at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant
Transportation of Spent Fuel and Radioactive Materials
Canada's Used Nuclear Fuel: invitation to dialogue Video
Glossary By The Dept. of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla
Did You Know That... By The Nuclear Energy Institute
Understanding Radiation By U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, Science & Technology
The History Of Nuclear Energy By U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, Science & Technology
Answers To Your Nuclear Questions By U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, Science & Technology
World Uranium Reserves By James Hopf
Back to the Nuclear Future By Denis Beller
Nuclear Radiation ? How Toxic is it? By James Hopf
Personal Radiation Dose Chart By The American Nuclear Society
The Need For Nuclear Power by Richard Rhodes and Denis Beller
size: 190Kb
Nuclear Waste Disposal: the Nature of the Problem By Jerry J. Cohen
size: 130Kb
Radioactivity from Coal Combustion —Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations.

There is no sensible alternative to nuclear power if we are to sustain civilization.

We need nuclear power, says James Lovelock, the man who inspired the Greens. “We reject nuclear energy with the same unreasoning arguments that our ancestors would have used to reject geothermal energy, the effort to harness the heat of the Earth. Compared with the imaginary dangers of nuclear power, the threat from the intensifying greenhouse effect seems all too real. I wholly support the Green wish to see all energy eventually come from renewable sources but I do not think that we have the time to wait until this happens. Nuclear power is unpopular but it is safer than power from fossil fuel. The worst that could happen, if Chernobyls become endemic, is that we live a little less long in a mildly radioactive world. To me this is preferable to the loss of our hard-won civilization in a greenhouse catastrophe.
“Nuclear electricity is now a well-tried and soundly engineered practice that is both safe and economic; given the will it could be applied quickly. It is risky if improperly used but, even taking the Chernobyl disaster into account, it is, according to a recent Swiss study, by far the safest of the power industries. Disinformation about its dangers sustains a climate of fearful ignorance and has artificially inflated the difficulties of disposing of nuclear waste and the cost of nuclear power. If permitted, I would happily store high-level waste on my own land and use the heat from it to warm my home. There seems no sensible reason why nuclear waste should not be disposed of in the deep subducting regions of the ocean where tectonic forces draw all deposits down into the magma.
“What stands against the use of nuclear power are not sensible scientific or economic arguments but a widespread, but unjustified, public fear... The Greens, have so frightened their supporters that a change of mind would be almost impossible.
“The accident at Chernobyl is almost always presented as if it were the greatest industrial disaster of the 20th century. Even the BBC, in a recent programme, stated that thousands had died there. Such exaggeration suspends rational thought and is an unnerving triumph of fiction over science. In fact, 45 died at Chernobyl, according to the UN report on the disaster, and many of them were the firemen and helicopter crews who tried to extinguish the fire. It was an awful event and should never have happened, but it was far less lethal than the smog of 1952, when 5,000 Londoners died from poisoning by coal smoke.”
— James Lovelock, preeminent world leader in the development of environmental consciousness.

www.jameslovelock.org —The personal website of James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory, inventor of the electron capture detector (which made possible the detection of CFCs and other atmospheric nano-pollutants) and of the microwave oven.

A DOSE OF NUCLEAR RADIATION By James Lovelock, Excerpt from The Ages of Gaia
NATURAL NUCLEAR REACTORS (OKLO) By James Lovelock, Excerpt from The Ages of Gaia
Something Nasty in the Greenhouse By James Lovelock

Environmental opposition to nuclear energy is the greatest misunderstanding and mistake of the century
Nuclear power is the only green solution By Dr. James Lovelock —Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.

A nuclear fission reactor at the center of the Earth:
Nuclear Planet —Earth is a gigantic natural nuclear power plant,
Says geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon
Natural Nuclear Reactors
Radioactivity in Nature
NATURAL NUCLEAR REACTORS (OKLO) By James Lovelock, Excerpt from The Ages of Gaia