[Mb-civic] Nuclear Power Is the Problem, Not a Solution By Dr. Helen Caldicott The Australian

[Michael Butler]

Also see below:    
Controversial Nuclear Fuel Arrives in US    €

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    Nuclear Power Is the Problem, Not a Solution
    By Dr. Helen Caldicott
    The Australian

    Wednesday 13 April 2005

    There is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify
nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.

    In fact Leslie Kemeny on these pages two weeks ago (HES, March 30)
suggested that courses on nuclear science and engineering be included in
tertiary level institutions in Australia.

    I agree. But I would suggest that all the relevant facts be taught to
students. Mandatory courses in medical schools should embrace the short and
long-term biological, genetic and medical dangers associated with the
nuclear fuel cycle. Business students should examine the true costs
associated with the production of nuclear power. Engineering students should
become familiar with the profound problems associated with the storage of
long-lived radioactive waste, the human fallibilities that have created the
most serious nuclear accidents in history and the ongoing history of
near-misses and near-meltdowns in the industry.

    At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world.
If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil
fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large,
1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been
ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical.
Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated
electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically
viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

    The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted
for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The
true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US
is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only
$US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US
federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear
reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous
expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a
million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear
electricity.

    It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very
different.

    In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including
Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the
electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large
quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global
warming.

    Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release
from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in
the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally
by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for
stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to
20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

    In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel
at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction
of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the
intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating
lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of
radioactive waste.

    In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan
Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse
gases than modern natural-gas power stations.

    Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is
therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors
consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air
and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear
industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically
inconsequential. This is not so.

    These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and
argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear
reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of
the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the
reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy
gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause
genetic disease.

    Tritium, another biologically significant gas, is also routinely emitted
from nuclear reactors. Tritium is composed of three atoms of hydrogen, which
combine with oxygen, forming radioactive water, which is absorbed through
the skin, lungs and digestive system. It is incorporated into the DNA
molecule, where it is mutagenic.

    The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at
the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed
by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor
manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per
year.

    Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in
cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting
transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous
material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels
through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.

    But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a
problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km
northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste. But
Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the
long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made
of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last
week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water
infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by
personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations,
according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a
waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its
expanding nuclear waste inventory.

    To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National
Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which
store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the
reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could
unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation -
significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to
some scientists.

    This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools
at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive
elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most
important being cancer and genetic diseases.

    The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to
radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and
immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the
malignant effects of radiation than other people.

    I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear
power plants.

    Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in
Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is
radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables
and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it
migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid
cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed
for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric
literature.

    Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates
in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation,
and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and
leukemia.

    Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food
chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle,
where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.

    Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so
toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made
annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled
like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes
liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood
malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the
placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital
deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can
cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations.
Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic
diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.

    Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons - only 5kg is necessary
to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year. Therefore
any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically manufacture 40
bombs a year.

    Because nuclear power leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations,
because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive
than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger
proliferation of nuclear weapons, these topics need urgently to be
introduced into the tertiary educational system of Australia, which is host
to 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the world's richest uranium.

    Dr. Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and
president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the
danger of nuclear energy.

 

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    Controversial Nuclear Fuel Arrives in US
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 13 April 2005

    MOX is made from weapons-grade plutonium.

    Columbia, SC - A French shipment of nuclear power plant fuel made from
weapons-grade plutonium arrived in the United States despite protests it
poses environmental and terrorist risks.

    The shipment of mixed-oxide fuel arrived in Charleston early Tuesday,
Duke Power spokeswoman Rose Cummings said. The MOX fuel, a mixture of
plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, will be tested at the Catawba Nuclear
Station on Lake Wylie, which is about 20 miles south of Charlotte, N.C.

    A small group of protesters tried unsuccessfully to follow a convoy
thought to be carrying the fuel.

    Tom Clements of Greenpeace International said he was concerned the
Catawba plant doesn't meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission security
requirements; the NRC said last month several conditions were still unmet.

    It's quite clear that their scrambling to meet the conditions of
storage," Clements said. "To me it represents the poor planning for the
overall plutonium disposition program and they're just trying to make up
things as they go along."

    He also complained about how easily he was able to "get right up near
the trucks" in the convoy as it left the Charleston Naval Weapons station.
"If we could identify them with minimal resources then anyone could identify
them," he said.

    The National Nuclear Security Administration and Duke Power officials
dismissed the concerns. They said the nuclear plant will have met NRC
requirements by the time the shipments arrive at Catawba.

    "The fuel assemblies are secure and have been secure without any
significant incidents," NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said. "Everything is on
schedule, it's been on schedule and according to plan."

    The Energy Department shipped the plutonium to France for conversion
because there's no U.S. plant that can do it. Officials want to build a
conversion facility near Aiken but construction has been delayed.