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Atomic Myths, Radioactive Realities:
Why nuclear power is a poor way to meet energy needs

Arjun Makhijani

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours . . . . This is the forecast for an age of peace.

Lewis Strauss,
AEC Chairman, 1954

It is safe to say . . . that atomic power is not the means by which man will for the first time emancipate himself economically, whatever that may mean; or forever throw off his mantle of toil, whatever that may mean. Loud guffaws could be heard from some of the laboratories working on this problem if anyone should in an unfortunate moment refer to the atom as the means of throwing off man's mantle of toil. It certainly is not that!

C. G. Suits,
Director of Research,
General Electric, 1951

Atomic power was born of self-deception as well as deliberate deception. There were messianic pronouncements of paradise on Earth that began at the end of World War II. Such fervent and self-deceptive excitement seemed to slide seamlessly into deliberate propaganda that the government knew was false. For by 1954, when Lewis Strauss made his famous statement that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter," a number of government and corporate studies had concluded the contrary.

Nor was there any reasonable prospect based on basic engineering considerations that nuclear power could be so cheap. In the most optimistic scenario for nuclear power, it might be assumed that the fuel cost would be nearly zero. But that would still leave eighty-five percent of the costs of electricity for residential and small business consumers and sixty percent for the largest industrial users intact. The reason is that the bulk of the costs of electricity are related not to the fuel and the boiler (the functions served by the nuclear fuel and nuclear reactor), but by the power generating equipment, and the transmission and distribution network. Moreover, it was clear even then that (i) nuclear reactors would cost far more than coal-fired boilers, and (ii) it would be difficult to manage and dispose of nuclear waste. And of course, nuclear fuel was not free.

The West knows the costs of uranium fuel well. This is especially so in the Colorado Plateau, which is dotted with about two hundred million tons of radioactive mill tailings and possibly a comparable amount of uranium mine waste. These wastes have injured health, polluted precious water supplies, and resulted in billions of dollars in clean-up costs. And the liabilities will extend into the future for tens of thousands of years.

Yet the propaganda continues in the face of this radioactive mess. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Rhodes and Denis Beller stated that the annual output of waste from a nuclear power plant was only a tiny twenty cubic meters (compacted). They then compare this to a weight measure - compared to half a million metric tons of waste for a coal-fired plant.

The figure of twenty cubic meters completely ignores the largest volume of nuclear waste, which is generated at uranium mines and mills. When that component is taken into account, the waste associated with coal is typically about five or ten times that of nuclear power-related waste, a far cry from ratio of about ten thousand implicit in the Rhodes and Beller article.

The biggest current argument for nuclear power is that it is the solution to the problem of severe climate change. Nuclear power does not emit carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the most important greenhouse gas, or at least not very much at all compared to a coal-fired power plant. Coal and oil burning are the principal sources of CO2 emissions that threaten serious climate change.

The new push for nuclear power also contains a messianic element - that it will make for a peaceful world. In this view, the world needs a vastly greater supply of energy to meet the needs of a growing world population, most of which has still to taste the kind of material consumption levels that are routine in industrialized countries. This rising energy consumption in developing countries is crucial to national security. According to Rhodes and Beller,

"Development depends on energy, and the alternative to development is suffering: poverty, disease, and death. Such conditions create instability and the potential for widespread violence. National security therefore requires developed nations to help increase energy production in their more populous developing counterparts."

Energy supply, use, and needs
The assertion that "development depends on energy" conflates energy supply, prevailing energy use patterns, and energy needs. These are very different concepts. Energy, other than in the forms of sunshine and food, is not a need in itself. Our needs are not for oil or electricity or coal. Rather we need to be able to see things at night, to cook, to go from one place to another with reasonable speed, safety, and comfort, etc. It takes some supply of energy to accomplish these things. But how much? The amount of fuels used to accomplish these tasks depends centrally on how efficiently the primary source of energy, the energy supply, performs the given task.

The efficiency of use of energy even in industrialized countries is pathetically low. For instance, a typical "high-efficiency" gas-fired furnace has an efficiency of less than ten percent, when evaluated by strict physics criteria. The average efficiency of electric lighting systems is about one percent - that is, only about one percent of the energy in the fuel used to generate the electricity comes out as visible light energy. The rest is wasted as heat either at the power plant or in the light bulb. Passenger transportation efficiency is similarly dismal.

However, currently available technology can vastly increase energy use efficiency. Two-thirds of U.S. energy use per unit of economic output could be eliminated using available technology, while still maintaining all the functions present-day fuel use performs. With a sensible program of energy research and public policy, it is quite possible to achieve energy use per unit of economic output at one-tenth present levels within a few decades.

Energy use in developing countries is less efficient. For instance, hundreds of millions of poor people still use candles and kerosene wick lamps for lighting because they have no electricity. The amount of light output that they can avail themselves of can be increased a hundred-fold or more without any change in energy input by going to efficient electric lighting.

Moreover, the most important components of energy use for the rural poor, who are the majority of the world's poor, are not even counted in energy data as it is normally compiled. For instance, wood and crop residues are rarely considered when arguments that large increases in energy supply are needed for development. Further, the energy used by draft animals, which provide the main source of energy for agricultural work for hundreds of millions of peasants in Asia, is not compiled in energy data or considered in development discussions.

In sum, it is quite possible to greatly improve material standards of living without increasing energy input in developing countries, and while actually reducing energy input in industrialized countries. Yet, the use of electricity, if done properly, can be one crucial element in increasing energy use efficiency. So it is still important to consider the pros and cons of electric power systems and the energy sources that can power them.

Comparing energy systems
Nuclear power brings its own severe vulnerabilities that are not related to climate change or the severe routine pollution often associated with coal mining and oil production. These vulnerabilities relate to:

• Nuclear weapons proliferation: Nuclear power technology has a large overlap with nuclear weapons technology. Nuclear power plants create weapons usable materials - plutonium in current designs.
• Severe accidents: Severe accidents on the scale of Chernobyl can occur with nuclear power plants, even though the details of accident mechanisms and accident probabilities vary with design, care of construction, and degree of independent oversight and regulation.
• Nuclear waste management: Wastes associated with nuclear power, from mill tailings to spent fuel, are very long-lived and threaten essential resources, notably water resources.

If the world continues to use oil for transportation (and oil accounts for about forty percent of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use today, most of it in the transport sector), thousands of nuclear power plants will have to be built in the next four decades to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions.

The proliferation implications of building so many plants and supplying them with fuel are stupendous. Inspecting them, enriching the uranium, ensuring that materials are not diverted into weapons programs would present challenges that would make today's proliferation concerns look like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. We already have confrontations between the United States and other countries over alleged nuclear weapons aspirations from far more modest programs involving a handful of power plants. The risk of losing a city once in a while to nuclear bombs should be an unacceptable part of an energy strategy.

Similarly, it would be difficult to inspect, regulate and maintain such a vast number of plants properly. Even the U.S. regulatory system is currently under considerable strain. Nuclear power plant owners are operating their plants at very high capacity factors, churning out profits, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows them to service some safety backup equipment while the power plants are still running.

The vulnerability of nuclear power plants, spent fuel storage, and plutonium storage facilities to terrorist attack, were revealed by the violent tragedy of September 11, 2001, as never before. Despite the vulnerabilities, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been lax and has not required hardened storage of spent fuel on site. It is extending the licenses of power plants without allowing consideration of terrorism risks.

Commercial Plutonium
The problems with nuclear power don't stop there. The romance with nuclear power has, from the start, been strongly associated with the use of plutonium as a fuel. This is because the most abundant uranium isotope in nature is uranium-238 - more than ninety-nine percent of natural uranium is U-238, which cannot sustain a chain reaction and is therefore not useful as a reactor fuel. The starting reactor fuel must necessarily be uranium-235, which is fissile but constitutes only about 0.7 percent of natural uranium. But U-238 has another property - when placed in a reactor, it absorbs a neutron, undergoes nuclear reactions, and gets transmuted into plutonium-239, which is fissile. Like uranium-235, plutonium-239 can be used to make bombs and fuel reactors. Converting uranium-238 into plutonium-239, in a kind of reactor called a "breeder reactor," can create more fuel than the reactor uses in its power generation mode. This is the "magical" aspect of nuclear power that has fascinated physicists and propagandists alike.

About $100 billion have been spent world-wide for over half a century in the effort to commercialize plutonium fuel and reactors that will "breed" it from uranium-238. The effort has been a vast economic and technical failure. Plutonium fuel is used to supply part of the fuel of less than three dozen reactors, most of them in France, out of a world total of more than 400 commercial reactors.

Surplus commercial plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods is piling up in enormous quantities at several nuclear sites. The largest stores are at the Sellafield site in Britain and the La Hague site in France where plutonium is separated chemically from the rest of spent fuel in vast factories known as reprocessing plants. The combined stock is enough to make more than twenty thousand nuclear bombs.

While nuclear weapon states may not use commercial plutonium to make weapons (since most also have military plutonium, which nuclear weapons designers prefer for its somewhat different mix of plutonium isotopes), separated commercial plutonium is an ever-present temptation for non-nuclear states that want to make weapons.

The risks of commercial plutonium diversion to military purposes has led the United States to adopt a bi-partisan policy since 1976 against use of plutonium as a commercial fuel in the United States. The fact that such fuels were also uneconomical (and remain so) also helped decide the issue. Unfortunately, the trend since 2001, when the energy plan created by Vice-President Cheney's task force was published, is towards lifting that taboo and re-opening the question of possible use of plutonium fuel in commercial reactors in the United States.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions
So where will the added electricity generating capacity come from? Clearly, coal has its problems, and the world needs also to reduce its consumption of oil, if only to reduce CO2 emissions. Table 1 below shows a comparison of the environmental effects of fossil fuel and nuclear power dominated energy systems.

The answer begins to emerge even apart from the proliferation problems with nuclear power. Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is the least polluting. If it is used in highly efficient "combined cycle" power plants, it emits only about one fourth as much CO2 per unit of electricity than coal. The cost of such natural gas-fired power plants is also quite low, so that for a fixed number of dollars, combined cycled plants can reduce CO2 emissions by forty percent more than nuclear power plants when used to replace coal-fired plants. This disparity exists even if we assume that nuclear power plants and their associated systems emit no CO2 whatsoever. The reason is that nuclear power plants are much more expensive.

Natural gas represents a good transition energy source. But much of the growth in electricity must come from renewable energy sources-wind, solar, and sustainably produced biomass. In developing countries, the efficiency of use of biomass can be greatly increased. Wind power is available in plentiful supply. Large wind power plants are cheaper than new nuclear power stations today.

Political will to accomplish these goals is lacking. Or rather, the political will is forcefully present in increasing oil supply and nuclear power, while being tepid when it comes to actually tapping the immense potential of efficiency, natural gas, and renewable energy sources. The political and institutional problems in tackling the problems of energy security and greenhouse gas emissions are actually far more severe than the technological challenges.

COMPARISON OF FOSSIL FUELS AND NUCLEAR POWER
	Nuclear, with plutonium economy	Nuclear, once- through uranium use	Fossil Fuels, present approach	Fossil Fuel, moderate use, and Renewables
Resource Base, present economics	indefinite future	50 to 100 years, possibly more	a few hundred years	indefinite future
Resource Base, including very low-grade resources	not required	indefinite future	Thousands of years	not required
Incremental Climate Change Risk	none*	none	potentially catastrophic	none if fossil fuels are largely phased out
Potential Consequences of catastrophic accidents	severe: long-lasting effects over large regions	severe: long-lasting effects over large regions	no consequences for large regions but may be locally severe; effects generally short term	no consequences for large regions but may be locally severe; effects generally short term
Air Pollution, routine operations	relatively low	relatively low	severe to moderate, depending on control technology	moderate to low, depending on control technology
Water Pollution, routine operations	potentially serious at mines and mills, but limited due to low uranium requirements; potentially serious at waste disposal sites	often serious at mines, mills, and uranium processing sites (includes non-radioactive and radioactive pollutants); potentially serious at waste disposal sites	often serious at coal mines; serious at some oil fields (includes non-radioactive and radioactive pollutants, notably radium-226 near many oil-wells)	potentially very low
Risk of Nuclear Weapons Problems	yes	yes, but less than with a breeder reactor economy	none	none
NOTE: These are incremental risks, assuming facilities are run with reasonable attention to environmental protection. * Questions have been raised about the effect of krypton-85 from extensive reprocessing for a breeder reactor system on cloud formation and hence potential climate change. However, krypton-85 can be removed from exhaust gases by cryogenic cooling.

Dr. Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. Additional information is available at www.ieer.org. Dr. Makhijani may be contacted at arjun@ieer.org

The foregoing is an excerpt of the paper (with full references) to be published in the University of Utah Law School Journal of Land, Resources, & Environmental Law in January 2004. Copies of that Journal, including all articles from the April 18, 2003 Symposium, are available for $20 from: William S. Hein & Co., Inc., 1285 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14209-1987, phone: (800) 828-7571.