=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #221
—February 20, 1991—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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AS THE BILL FOR NUCLEAR POWER COMES DUE.
Whether you favor the Gulf War or not, you should know that
President Bush and his friends are using it as a smoke screen to
cover anti-environmental policies they are pushing on the home
front. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) announced Jan. 26 (NY TIMES, pg. 11) that toxic chemicals
and radioactivity entering the environment will now get reduced
attention from the agency.
Mr. Bush’s 1991 energy plan calls for fast-track licensing of
more nuclear power plants accompanied by new limits on public
comment on the siting of radioactive waste dumps. (NY TIMES Feb.
9, pg. 41). For its part, the nuclear industry is using the Gulf
War to try to frighten us all into believing we need more nuclear
power plants because our foreign oil supplies are “dangerously
unpredictable.”
Unfortunately, nuclear power isn’t a good answer to our need to
get loose from our Middle East oil dependency. For all its
chrome-plated promise, nuclear power has fallen flat on its
face–and the worst is yet to come. Nuclear power plants are now
facing a challenge that their designers never anticipated, though
they should have–what to do with the power plants after their
useful lives are over.
Nuclear power plants last 30 years or less. After 30 years, a
reactor’s pressure vessel becomes brittle and subject to
breakage, simply as a result of constant bombardment by nuclear
particles. In addition, after 30 years or so, the radioactivity
in pipes and valves has accumulated to a point where maintenance
workers are receiving unacceptable doses of radioactivity, so
more maintenance crews must come in (to reduce the time any one
worker spends getting zapped), which makes maintenance expensive.
Old nuclear plants cannot simply be abandoned, or demolished with
a wrecking ball. They are full of radioactivity, all of which
must be kept away from living things. Much of the radioactivity
decays away within 50 years, but three million years must pass
before a nuclear plant becomes no more radioactive than the
original uranium that initially fueled it. Managing a defunct
nuclear reactor, and its associated load of radioactivity, is
called “decommissioning” it.
At the end of 30 years (or less), there are three choices for
decommissioning a defunct reactor: (a) dismantle it and ship it
to a radioactive waste dump; (b) mothball it for 30 to 50 years
while its worst radioactivity decays, then dismantle it and ship
it to a dump somewhere; (c) weld its doors shut, “permanently”
entomb it in concrete, and walk away.
This last option is no longer considered a real possibility
because nuclear engineers have figured out that normal weathering
processes will destroy the “tomb” long before the radioactivity
inside has decayed away to harmless levels. Therefore, simply
“entombing” a reactor is not acceptable from a public health
perspective.
This leaves only two choices. Unfortunately, the first
choice–dismantle it and ship it to a dump somewhere–assumes
that an appropriate dump exists. However, after 50 years of
trying to figure out what to do with radioactive wastes, our
government and its friends in the nuclear industry still have no
real plan for safely managing radioactive wastes. There are plans
underway to dig exploratory holes in the ground in Nevada,
Washington state, and Texas (and Uncle Sam is already digging a
giant hole in the ground in New Mexico, all the while protesting
that this hole is not intended for decommissioned reactors), but
at each of these locations unexpected problems have come to
light, and there are groups of scientists at each location who
have good reasons for believing that each place is unsafe for
storing radioactive garbage for hundreds of thousands of
years–something humans have never tried to do before.
Therefore, there is only one remaining solution to this problem,
and it really is a temporary fix at best: weld the doors shut,
encase the place in concrete or steel, put up huge
skull-and-crossbones signs to try to scare curious children away,
and settle back to wait while Uncle Sam comes up with a solution
to the radioactive waste problem. This, of course, has the added
benefit of passing all the major costs along to our children or
grandchildren. Current estimates are that decommissioning a
reactor will cost anywhere from $100 million to one billion
dollars per reactor. Since initial estimates for the cost of
building reactors were low by at least 1000%, we should probably
take these first decommissioning estimates as optimistic best
guesses, likely to turn out to be sadly low.
In the U.S., four small commercial reactors are waiting to be
“decommissioned” now. During the next 18 years, an additional 67
large nuclear reactors will need to be decommissioned. Worldwide,
more than a dozen reactors have already been shut down and are
awaiting decommissioning; 66 more will retire by the year 2000,
and an additional 162 will need to be decommissioned by 2010. The
problem is growing.
In the meantime, we must not create any more of these deadly,
expensive hulks. U.S. taxpayers sunk $70 billion in subsidies
into the development of nuclear power technology; electric
utilities invested an additional $125 billion, which is more than
the cost of the entire space program or the war in Vietnam. Our
commitment to nuclear power has slowed the search for real
solutions to our energy problems because dollars spent on nuclear
plants are not available for finding real solutions–like
weatherizing buildings or making efficient cars. Past investments
in nuclear power are one major reason why we’re still hooked on
Middle East oil today. Our enormous investment in nuclear power
has yielded reactors which in general cost less to write off
after they are built than they cost to operate, and which
collectively today deliver to the country about half as much
energy as wood. So far the damage bill is about $200 billion and
the bills still to be paid for cleaning up the
mess–decommissioning, waste disposal, uranium mine and mill
leftovers, etc.-will probably cost about as much as has been
invested already, assuming we can find technically and
politically acceptable ways to do these jobs at all.[1]
The national commitment to nuclear power is the greatest
industrial disaster ever suffered in our history. (And now the
same people who brought us nuclear power are doing their best to
scare us into buying municipal solid waste incinerators–another
disastrous technology from every perspective.) To let Saddam
Hussein frighten us into further massive investments in these
failed technologies would be to hand this twobit dictator a real
long-term victory. But that’s precisely what George Bush’s 1991
energy plan says the President is bent on doing. Will we never
learn?
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Get: Cynthia Pollock, DECOMMISSIONING: NUCLEAR POWER’S MISSING
LINK (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute [1776 Massachusetts
Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036; phone (202) 452-1999], 1986).
$4.00.
Descriptor terms: george bush; policies; persian gulf; nuclear
power plants; radioactive waste; radioactivity; decommissioning;
landfilling; nv; wa; tx; nm; costs; epa; NEW YORK TIMES;