Time for change

In the discussion about risks of nuclear power plants, some people argue that nuclear power plants got much more safe during the last years. The questions are probably "are nuclear plants safe enough ?" or "how safe are they?" and "how can this be measured and approved".

Theoretically it is possible to calculate the risk of failures of technical plants. For this purpose, potential failures for components within a plant must be assigned a certain probability. This probability is either taken from past experience (only possible for components which are often used and already in service for years) or it is estimated by teams of experts. In the next step, all potential consequences of the failure of the above mentioned component have to be looked at and given a certain probability. For a complex plant like a nuclear power plant, this is an extremely complex calculation involving a high number of specialists.

Certainly, over the years, we have become better in calculating risks of technical systems. However the biggest flaw in risk calculations is still the possibility to look over a potentially disastrous combination of failures. If no one could think of a specific failure to happen then no measures against will be applied and its respective likelihood and consequences won't be part of any risk calculations.

The more complex a system is, the higher the likelihood of missing out certain risks. This is typical human (we are not perfect) and this also seems to be one of the main causes of the dangerous incident in one of Sweden's nuclear power plant in Summer 2006.

Assuming you can get a figure for the safety of a specific plant, it just opens the questions again "is this figure of safety enough high, is it acceptable?" and also "how exact is the figure of safety?".

At the end, we have to look at the potential consequences of a failure. And even if the probability for catastrophic consequences should be extremely low - it can never be zero. Therefore sooner or later we have to face the question whether we are prepared to accept such catastrophes or not. The likelihood for such a catastrophe is increasing with each additional plant being put in operation. This is independent of technology.

As far as nuclear power plants are concerned, the consequences of catastrophic failures are far too devastating and therefore not acceptable for me.

The problem isn't nuclear power. The problem is perception. Opponents of nuclear energy only talk to other opponents, and keep recycling the same misinformation. Often it's plain misrepresentation of facts, sometimes it's endless cycles of what-ifs, and the rest of the time it's emotionally-loaded symbolism.

I'm going to respond to each of the points you've made. I know that you will simply raise other objections because every opponent I've ever spoken to has always done that. Having made up your mind that you're going to oppose nuclear energy, you will not give up. As long as your imagination allows, you'll invent one objection after another until you've found one no one has studied yet, and you'll seize on it as vindication of your initial commitment. That's the reason people less patient than I despair of holding a productive dialogue with you.

* Spent-Fuel Waste *

The waste problem of nuclear power plants, unlike the waste problem of coal-burning plants, does have a solution, in fact a number of solutions. The current policy is to bury long-lived wastes in a repository that presently is under construction. Opponents argue that some unspecified cultural change could wipe out civilization and it's possible that hunter-gatherers could dig 1000 feet into a mountain located in a dismayingly barren desert and find the wastes. Even as many as a dozen people could be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Consider that on the scale of the problems we're facing, such an improbable and limited mishap disappears into insignificance. More to the point, those wastes are actually valuable fuel. With current technology they can be consumed, leaving short-lived wastes which will lose their dangerous nature in some short time. The length of time actually can be determined by the way they are treated, but we should be thinking in terms of decades, not millennia. All that is required for this to happen is a political decision.

* Accidents *

Despite the lurid imaginations of nuclear opponents, we learned from Chernobyl that the consequences of a worst-case accident, even in the shockingly-unsafe reactors built by the Soviet government, are comparable with other disasters that the human race has endured. The World Health Organization, after an extensive investigation, put the upper limit of deaths resulting from the Chernobyl accident at 4000. As tragic as that is, it pales against the tens of thousands of deaths due to coal burning just in this country every year. But more important than that is the defense-in-depth design that goes into every power reactor in the rest of the world. Aside from Chernobyl, commercial nuclear power plants have a perfect safety record. No other energy source can point to such a record, not solar, not wind, not geothermal. But if you insist on including Chernobyl in your deliberations, you also should include the environmental devastation to that part of the world done by coal-burning power plants and oil refineries, which dwarfed the effects of the accident.

* Terrorist Attacks *

As a matter of fact, all the studies done so far show that reactors could sustain a 9/11-style attack without releasing radioactive material. Look at http://www.nei.org/documents/eprinuclearplantstructuralstudy200212.pdf. Nor is a reactor a suitable target for a ground-based attack. The reactors all will shutdown automatically in the even of any disturbance.

* Bomb Proliferation *

I'm sure you understand that plutonium isn't shipped around by itself. In the context of fuel handling, it is always mixed with other fuel materials. Although plutonium oxide isn't especially dangerous to handle, the other materials certainly are. Even if a thief were suicidal, he wouldn't live long enough to steal the materials without heavy shielding.

Contrary to what you've been told, it isn't easy to make a bomb. Even if encyclopedias show diagrams of bombs, they don't show everything. In fact, bombs have only been made when nations devoted their best scientific minds and vast capital resources to the project. And, really, under those conditions, stealing spent fuel from the US isn't a requirement.

Dirty bombs have to be considered separately. Suppose that despite extensive security measures, terrorists obtained some amount, even a large amount, of radioactive material and blew it up in some populated place. Well, that would be a catastrophe by anyone's standard. It ranks with a lot of threats terrorists pose, such as spreading biological agents or blowing up a tanker filled with ammonia or chlorine. Without minimizing the consequences, I should mention that people can be decontaminated quickly to limit injuries and, given time, cleanup crews can decontaminate the area affected. Radiation does have the feature of being easy to detect, unlike biological agents.

* Uranium Reserves *

The short supply of uranium you refer to is based only on a rather stupid policy imposed by one of our less-respected presidents, that required fuel to be discarded when only a few percent of its energy had been extracted. That policy has been reversed since then, and now there are centuries-worth of fuel available, giving us much more time to develop true renewable sources.

* Design & Licensing Time *

This is a made-up argument. In the creaky days of the 1970's, it took ten years to design, license, and build a new plant. In the information age, using stadardized designs, one must suppose that the times will be greatly shortened. But for now, there's no basis for arguing time intervals of 20 or 30 years.

* Parting thoughts *

I don't expect this comment to have much effect. All I can do is state the facts and ask you to check them. The facts are that nuclear energy has the best safety record and the best environmental record of any energy souce available to us, and of all the things we have to do to avoid climate change, it's the quickest and most cost-effective and will have the greatest impact. Fully a third of the fossil fuels we burn go into generating electricity. All of that electricity generation can be converted to nuclear or, preferably, a mix of nuclear and renewable.

We've waited for over 30 years for true renewables to become practical and none of them have. Of all of them, wind power is the closest. But it depends on energy storage, and the only storage available is in existing hydropower dams. Once the use of wind power and other renewables reach the usable storage capacity of the dams, they're done.

So I ask that you be a little more analytical and a lot less idealogical, and take a hard, cold look at our energy options as they exist now. Not in some future, parallel universe, not in some imaginary world where breaking up evil conspiracies will solve all our problems, but here and now.