From so simple a beginning…

Back in the days when I was still cutting classes and fortifying my immune system by hanging out in the university cafeteria, one of the running departmental jokes among my friends was about the decrepit-looking old building designated “nuclear chemistry”, a remnant of the sometime heyday of that science when a well-known nuclear chemist had built up that part of the department. Loathing the dreary, dim environment of the corridors in the building, we used to prefer the anagram of “nuclear” for referring to that place- “unclear chemistry”

That reference rings eerily and sadly true now, when I see the same designation rooted not only in the minds of jocular students, but responsible policy makers, environmentalists and government leaders. It always strikes me how I vehemently disagree with the same liberal pro-environmentalists that I identify with when it comes to nuclear power. Even today when global warming is accepted by many and expedient discussion goes on in every political quarter, very few liberal democrats seriously consider nuclear power as a saviour of our energy-hungry society. Even Al Gore fails to seriously grasp and extoll the potential of this powerful source, the technology for which already exists. More pernicious is the deeply rooted fear in the American public’s mind of all things nuclear, clearly a remnant of their history and experience with the Cold War and nuclear weapons, but a remnant that should by now have become obsolete.

This is especially strange considering that nuclear power already provides substantial electricity in parts of the world including the US; France which is a role model in this respect gets almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, Japan gets 30%, the US gets 20% and India gets 10%. 103 nuclear power reactors already dot the landscape of the United States. There has not been a single fatality caused by any of these. Yet we see mainly fear-induced opposition to the further exploitation of nuclear power, the burial of radioactive waste and serious considerations of this source of energy as a primary vehicle in the fight against carbon emissions. It is galling to know that policy makers and the public are rejecting a source of energy which already has been refined and tested, whose safety exceeds that of conventional energy sources by orders of magnitude, and which promises an almost instantly accessible solution to the problem of climate change and foreign oil dependence. It is particularly disconcerting to note the opposition, given that even from an economic standpoint, nuclear power promises to be much cheaper in the long term than alternative sources of energy, partly because the technology already exists, and mainly because after the initial investment the returns outweigh the costs. If anything, its costs will break even with those of other sources.

Two modes of thinking seem to be involved in this opposition to nuclear power; concerns about its safety which have been unconsciously ingrained and which are for the most part largely divorced from reality, and a failure to grasp relative measures of safety related to much of our energy sources and ways of life which we have taken for granted. It seems worthwhile to take a look at some of the major objections that the public has against nuclear power, mostly as a knee-jerk reaction, and try to compare those fears with factual reality.

1. Concerns about the intensity of radiation: For those who think that nuclear power plants are major sources of radiation, it is highly instructive to consider only some of the sources of radiation in our daily lives relative to nuclear power plants- measured in the radiation unit millirems and calculating the average dose that each person receives worldwide per year; coal-fired plants release 2 millirems along with immense amounts of toxic chemical byproducts and greenhouse gases, medical diagnostics including x-rays release 40 millirems, natural background radiation including radon from the ground releases 300 millirem.

Now contrast this with nuclear power plants which release 0.05 millirems.

These differences are tremendous, and it is especially stupefying to know how the natural radiation that bathes us is thousands of times more than any radiation released due to nuclear reactors. Even the most insidious nuclear accident, Chernobyl, released something like a millionth of the amount of radiation due to natural sources into the environment. On top of this, consider the fact that coal-fired plants and chemical accidents are responsible for about 40,000 annual premature deaths, car accidents claim about 15,000, heart disease claims several times more, and even deaths due to swimming pool drownings claim a couple of dozen lives. In contrast, nuclear power plants in the US have claimed not a single life during the last 40 years of their operation. At the most, having nuclear plants provide electricity is still several orders of magnitude less dangerous than many activities that we indulge in our lives. Uranium mining does involve the release of radioactive material and use of toxic chemicals, but its dangers are again dwarfed by the seriousness of industrial pollution and accidents. Combined with the their lack of greenhouse gas pollution, the small volume of their byproducts and the energy efficiency that they provide, nuclear power plants should seem nothing less than an epitome of safety and efficiency. Sadly they do not.

2. Concerns about radioactive waste: Talk to anyone opposing nuclear power, and objections to the burial of nuclear waste will likely be their first and most common counterargument, as if it’s almost common knowledge. But there are several red herrings, straw men and as many fallacies as you can think of in here. Firstly, consider the objection of environmentalists to the thousands of spent fuel rods lying around in contaminated water pools around nuclear reactors. But this objection is not only a straw man but it’s disingenuous to some extent, because it’s precisely environmentalists who have lobbied against the transportation and reprocessing of these fuel rods, something that is done routinely in other places without any accident. The fact is that these fuel rods are rich in plutonium and other fissile isotopes and can be reprocessed. This reprocessing serves two important purposes; firstly it makes them safer to bury and less radioactive and secondly it makes them less valuable to nuclear terrorists, which should assuage the concerns of those worried about national security. In fact, burying the spent fuel rods as they are will not only be a waste of the valuable plutonium in them, but will also after a long period of time enrich them in the longer-lived plutonium relative to the other short-lived isotopes, which would now make them more attractive to terrorists seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Clearly, reprocessing spent fuel rods and then burying them will prevent multiple hazards and provide obvious material and economic benefits. France has been doing it for a long time, so has Japan and they have faced no major problem.

The main objections about burial of nuclear waste regarding safety are also not built on firm ground (no pun there). There has been a lot of inertia against the proposed Yucca Mountain burial repository in Nevada. As indicated above, first of all burying only reprocessed fuel rods will get rid of the long-lived isotopes in them and will leave only the short-lived ones whose radioactivity will become weak over time. Thus, people who raise questions about the integrity of geological conditions and burial casks over hundreds of thousands of years are again raising a straw man; the issue should not be so serious for reprocessed rods. Also, ample testing has now indicated that adequate measures can be taken to ensure the integrity of burial casks. Liquid waste can be petrified in glass and encased in multiple layers of concrete and steel that would make the strength of the casks second to nothing else that we can construct. Testing has also included possible susceptibility to water and chemical corrosion, geologic formation and possible release of nuclear material and even earthquakes. All indicators predict that good measures exist for protecting and burying nuclear waste. The opposition is not mainly technical and scientific, it is political and social. Politicians play off people’s ill-informed opinions and feelings as election strategies. Such politicking undermines sound scientific and rational debate.

3. Concerns about reactor accidents and nuclear terrorism: In multiple polls, when people have been asked to imagine the consequences of a nuclear reactor accident near their homes, the perceived scenarios have been grossly exagerrated and resemble more the result of a nuclear explosion, with bodies writhing and strewn all around. However, an explosion in a nuclear power plant is virtually impossible with present day standards. Again, people commonly point to Chernobyl as if that was emblematic of what can happen with nuclear power plants. But Chernobyl was an abomination and an anomaly for the nuclear industry. It is true that an explosion did occur at Chernobyl, but it and its consequences were the results of blatant indifference to containment structures and safety measures, gross human error, and a centralised system of government that made the quick dissemination of information, mobilisation of personnel and evacuation of populations painfully slow and protracted. Many people’s lives would have been saved at Chernobyl had attention been provided to basic safety and operation. A panel of US scientists convened after the accident concluded that such an accident was almost impossible in the US, given the stringent safety precautions and structural enhancements that US nuclear reactors have. In telling contrast to Chernobyl, the accident at Three Mile Island was quickly contained and led to no radiation-related deaths. Pointing to Chernobyl as an argument against nuclear power is like pointing to car accidents and making that a case against automobile manufacturing and development.

The same measures that protect nuclear reactors and make them some of the strongest man-made structures in the world also would make a terrorist attack on such reactors highly unlikely. Assuming terrorists have breached the multiple levels of alarm systems and security in a US nuclear reactor, stealing, packaging and transporting the intensely radioactive fuel rods would be a tremendously difficult and time-consuming undertaking, and it is almost impossible to imagine how any group could pull it off. Anyone handling fuel rods without sophisticated instrumentation would be dead in hours if not minutes. Transporting the rods would again take immensely strong and time-tested casks of the kind that are always used for transporting nuclear material safely around the country.

Terrorist measures have already been implemented within all US nuclear installations especially after September 11, ranging from much better and multiple levels of security to mock commando raids that identify and rectify kinks in the system. All these measures make terrorist attacks against nuclear reactors much less likely to succeed than attacks against civilian structures and chemical and industrial plants. Nor is an airline hit on a nuclear plant likely. After September 11, no-fly zones have been enforced around almost all nuclear facilities, and even a successful hit on a nuclear plant would not ensure the dispersal of radioactive substances over a large civilian area. Again, constantly talking about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants constitutes a straw man, since attacks against other installations are both much more likely and more likely to succeed. Because of these deterrence measures, it also makes it very likely that stealing material from a nuclear reactor should rank low on terrorist plans for its unfeasibility, and much more attention should be given to simpler tactics that terrorists will continue to explore.

Fear of the word “nuclear” is deeply rooted within the American psyche. It is unfortunate that the public cannot dissociate nuclear power from nuclear weapons which are a grotesque legacy of war. Politicians constantly exploit this fear like they exploit other kinds of fear. This fear inflation leads to a mental severing with factual reality, a severing that is reinforced by US history and fear of nuclear weapons. But it is very important to educate the citizenry and separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to nuclear power. Politicians themselves seem to be suffering from a kind of self-illusion about nuclear energy. As usual, they also want to make it a partisan issue. Among the Presidential candidates, I haven’t seen a single one candidly, rationally and forcefully discussing the benefits of nuclear power; in fact many of them (such as John Edwards) downright oppose it. More than others, public policy makers need to have a balanced mind that does a scientific analysis of the pros and cons of this power source. Nuclear power is much more reliable, cheaper and already technologically developed than biodiesel, wind and solar power, sources which the candidates regularly talk about. It cannot be a single solution, but it should constitute a dominant part of the solution. This source of power has been around for a long time, has been tested, and promises to be the most productive, safest, and most easily implementable form of energy for our future.

Further reading on nuclear power:
1. Before it’s too late: A Scientist’s Case for Nuclear Energy- Bernard Cohen, 1983
2. Nuclear Renewal- Richard Rhodes, Viking Books, 1993
3. Megawatts and Megatons- Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak, University of Chicago Press, 2002
4. A Case for Nuclear-Generated Electricity- Scott Heaberlin, Battelle Press, 2003 (Probably the most informally written and entertaining of all)
5. Nuclear Energy- David Bodansky, Springer, 2004 (More technical than others, but good for basics, figures and data)
6. Power to Save the World- Gwyneth Cravens, Knopf, 2007

© Ashutosh Jogalekar