Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (48 page)

Having visited a number of nuclear plants and witnessed the security first-hand it is clear to me it would be suicide to try to get past the perimeter without permission. And as far as flying an aircraft into a reactor dome, engineers thought of that long before 9/11. The containment structures around the reactors were designed to withstand an impact from a falling aircraft, simply because of the possibility that a plane might fall out of the sky. If a terrorist did manage to drive an aircraft into a nuclear reactor, it would be a very bad day at the plant, but it would not breach the containment and would not release radiation into the environment.
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Besides, it is virtually impossible to navigate an unauthorized large aircraft in American airspace in the post-9/11 world without it being detected early on. The fact that no terrorist attack has been made on any nuclear plant might indicate terrorist groups are well aware of these facts.

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation?

Then there is the charge that nuclear power plants increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. This is a more serious issue than safety or terrorism and deserves careful analysis. For many of us in the early years of the environmental movement our association of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons was the real deal-breaker. This was one of our biggest mistakes.

No nuclear weapon has been manufactured using the plutonium produced in a civilian power reactor. All the nuclear weapons states have dedicated military or research reactors for producing plutonium, which is extracted from used nuclear fuel. It is certainly possible to extract plutonium from the used fuel from civilian power reactors. But the first question I have for people who insist civilian reactors increase the threat of proliferation is: If we shut down all 439 civilian power reactors, how would that convince the military to shut down its weapons-producing reactors? Aren’t those the reactors we should be campaigning to shut down?

Another important point is that one does not need a nuclear power plant to build a nuclear weapon. In fact it is much easier to enrich uranium to weapons grade material with centrifuge technology than it is to extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel. The concern over Iran’s nuclear program is primarily due to the fact that it has the centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons-grade material. These same centrifuges can be used to produce the far less enriched uranium that fuels a nuclear reactor. This is why the strong international inspection program provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency is crucial.

But what about rogue states? you may ask. The answer is that shutting down all the nuclear plants in the world would not reduce the risk that deranged leaders or dictators might build nuclear weapons. The situation in North Korea, for example, can only be dealt with by political or possibly military means. Turning off a major portion of the world’s cleanest electricity would be unlikely to dissuade Kim Jong-Il from building nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Maybe the world would be a better place if nuclear weapons had not been invented. However, we will never know if this is so. While it may be possible to make nuclear weapons illegal, it is impossible to eliminate them. Therefore if good people give up nuclear weapons only evil people will acquire them. There are not many more fundamental dilemmas.

The above points make it clear that if civilian nuclear reactors pose a risk, it is a very small one and is by no means central to the challenge of preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons. Aside from these points, there is a more important general principle that should be considered.

Whether we like it or not, many of our most important tools and technologies can be used for destructive purposes. And many of our most useful and beneficial technologies were originally invented as weapons of war and only later adopted for nonmilitary means. It is likely that the club was invented before the hammer. Why would we outlaw the beneficial uses of a technology simply because it can also be used for destructive or evil purposes? Consider a few examples:

Fire can be used to burn down a city and kill thousands of people. Should we ban fire for cooking and heating?

Car bombs are made with fertilizer, diesel oil, and a car. Should we ban those three rather useful things?

Guns can be used for hunting and for defending one’s country or for committing genocide.

Nuclear medicine is used to diagnose and treat millions of people every year, using radioactive isotopes that are produced in nuclear reactors. Should we ban nuclear reactors and nuclear medicine because nuclear technology can be used to make bombs?

What weapon has caused the most combat deaths in recent decades? Not guns, not car bombs, not cruise missiles, not nuclear weapons, but the simple machete, a big knife. Over a million people have died by the machete in the past 20 years, mainly in Africa, four times as many as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Yet the machete is the most important tool for millions of farmers in developing countries. They use it to clear land, cut firewood, and harvest their crops, which are all necessary activities.

You can bet the machete will not be banned anytime soon. But consider the fact that the machete used to harvest crops is exactly the same tool used to kill people. No modifications are required. But a nuclear power plant that is used to produce energy or medical isotopes is a completely different tool from a nuclear weapon. You can’t drop a nuclear plant on a city.

Therefore I believe it is a general rule that we should not ban the beneficial uses of a particular technology just because that technology can be used for destructive purposes.

This harkens back to the earlier discussion about chlorine. While it is true that chlorine is toxic and that it has been used to kill troops and civilians in war, it is also the most important element for public health and medicine. This recognition of a balanced, educated, and logical approach is a central theme on the path to becoming a sensible environmentalist.

Nuclear Waste: Fuel of the Future

For many people, nuclear waste is the key concern that leads them to reject nuclear energy as an option. This is partly because they fear radiation in the event of the escape of nuclear waste and partly because they are concerned about future generations’ ability to manage nuclear waste. However, as we will see there is little reason to lose sleep over either worry. I’m not being flippant; it’s just that the reality is so different from the popular perception that a little shock treatment is in order.

People in the nuclear industry, and those who understand the technical aspects of nuclear energy, prefer the term
used nuclear fuel to nuclear waste. Antinuclear activists invariably refer to nuclear waste and they call facilities designed to store used nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials “nuclear waste dumps.”

The fuel that originally goes into a typical nuclear reactor is pure uranium. During the nuclear reaction, part of the uranium is burned, splitting it in two and releasing vast amounts of energy, which is used to make steam to run turbines to produce electricity. The elements that result from splitting uranium are called “fission products.” Uranium splits in many ways, so the fission products are a mixture of many different isotopes, some which decay in less than a microsecond and others that remain radioactive for a few centuries. Most of the used fuel is unburned uranium and another portion of it is uranium that has been converted, as a result of the nuclear reaction, into plutonium and other heavy elements, such as americium and californium.

Most of the fission products in the used fuel have no known useful purpose at present and can therefore be categorized as waste, although cesium-137 is used in medicine and uses for other fission products may eventually be found. The fission products include such isotopes as cesium-137, strontium-90 and iodine-131, which are biologically active and should not be ingested. They must be isolated from the environment until they decay into nonradioactive elements as they would otherwise pose serious problems to human health and the environment. Fortunately the longest lived fission products of concern decay into nonradioactive elements in about 300 years. This may seem like a long time, but in reality it is not difficult to design containers, and facilities in which to store those containers, that will be secure for much longer than 300 years.

The good news is that the majority of the used fuel, the uranium and plutonium in particular, can be recycled and made into new nuclear fuel. Used nuclear fuel contains at least 95 percent of the energy that was in the original fuel. In other words only about 5 percent of the energy is extracted from the nuclear fuel in its first cycle through the reactor. It makes no sense to call used fuel waste when 95 percent of it can be reused. Used nuclear fuel is one of our most important future energy resources. And even if the original uranium was imported from another country, it is now a domestic energy resource, thus reducing concerns about energy security.

The technology for recycling used nuclear fuel was originally developed to extract the plutonium in the used fuel to make nuclear weapons. As mentioned earlier there are two main ways to make nuclear bombs: by enriching natural uranium to increase the level of uranium-235 to about 95 percent, or by extracting plutonium from used reactor fuel. The militaries of the nuclear weapons states were not interested in the other radioactive elements in the used fuel and during the Cold War these materials were disposed of in ways that today are totally unacceptable. It is similar to the manner in which toxic chemical wastes were simply buried or dumped prior to the advent of the environmental movement. This has resulted in a Cold War legacy of military nuclear waste that is being cleaned up at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.

In the same way nuclear fission, originally harnessed for weapons, is now used to make energy, recycling technology can be used for the peaceful purpose of producing even more energy rather than making bombs. Indeed, the trend is distinctly in this direction around the world, beating nuclear swords into nuclear plowshares.

When antinuclear folks tell us “nuclear waste will remain radioactive for millions of years” they are talking about the uranium, plutonium, and other heavy elements. But these can be burned as fuel and thus converted into fission products with much shorter lives. This is only one of the benefits of recycling used fuel. Another, of course, is the fact that the uranium that was mined in the first place can be recycled many times to produce over 100 times as much energy, if all the uranium-238 is burned. And not only are the fission products much shorter-lived than the uranium and plutonium, there is much less waste to dispose of because most of the used fuel has been recycled.

One of the principle mantras of the environmental movement is that we should “reduce, reuse, and recycle” the materials we employ to make goods and energy. The recycling and reuse of used nuclear fuel, and the reduction in the amount of waste fits squarely into this concept and should therefore be embraced by the movement as the correct approach to managing used nuclear fuel.

With conventional nuclear reactors we use less than 1 percent of the uranium that is mined from the ground. Natural uranium is 0.7 percent uranium-235, which is the
fissile
isotope (it is the only fissile isotope on the earth, without it there could be no nuclear energy). The balance of 99.3 percent is uranium-238, which is not fissile, but it is
fertile
. A fissile isotope is one that will support a chain reaction, and thus can be used as a nuclear fuel. A fertile isotope is one that can be converted into a fissile isotope in a nuclear reactor. For example, during a conventional reactor’s operation, some of the uranium-238 is transmuted (converted) into plutonium-239, which is a fissile isotope and can be used as a fuel. Thorium is the other important fertile element that can be transmuted into a fissile isotope, in this case plutonium-233. There is about four times as much thorium in the earth’s crust as there is uranium.

What this means is that we can eventually convert all the uranium-238 into plutonium and burn it as a fuel. Instead of using only 0.7 percent of natural uranium we can use 100 percent, increasing the energy potential by more than 100 times. In other words, 100 years of nuclear energy production can be turned into more than 10,000 years of energy production. It is somewhat akin to the biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes, according to which thousands of people were fed with five loaves of bread and two small fish. This is what is meant when nuclear energy is described as sustainable.

A number of countries are already recycling some of their used nuclear fuel. Of the 290,000 tonnes (319,700 tons) of used fuel produced during the past 50 years about 90,000 tonnes (99,200 tons) have already been recycled. France is in the forefront of this technology with a large recycling facility at Cap la Hague in Normandy, capable of recycling 1700 tonnes (1870 tons) per year.
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Of France’s 59 nuclear power stations, 22 have been modified to burn recycled fuel. Russia, the U.K., and India also have recycling facilities. Japan has recently completed a US$30 billion nuclear fuel fabrication and recycling facility at Rokkasho, north of Tokyo.
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It is modeled on the French technology but with improvements that make it much less susceptible to the risk of proliferation. The United States had to approve the construction of the recycling plant in Japan because of treaties between the two countries regarding trade in nuclear materials.
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