To the Editor:
It is most heartening to see COMMENTARY stand up to the anti-nuclear witch-hunt with another excellent article by Samuel McCracken, “The Harrisburg Syndrome” [June].
I would, however, like to supplement (not contradict) a point about meltdowns. It is true that the Three Mile Island unit #2 was at no time near a meltdown; it is also true that a meltdown, “once it starts, is irreversible.” But it should be added that even if a meltdown did occur, it would not necessarily lead to large-scale loss of life, or even, necessarily, to any casualties at all.
We have some experience from the steel industry, where hearth and ladle failures have led to charges of up to 250 tons of molten steel spilling onto the floor. I have interviewed metallurgist Edward Kaminski, an eyewitness to three such incidents (1949-51) in Youngstown, Ohio. In the worst of these incidents, the distance to which the metal melted toward China before it solidified was about 5 inches. While it is true that molten steel does not, like fission products, generate heat beyond its initial heat content, the analogy is a guideline for putting the “China syndrome” in perspective.
It is, in any case, not this aspect of a meltdown that is the greatest danger; that comes from the radioactive volatile particles and gases that might be released into the atmosphere. It is the purpose of the containment building to prevent this type of release after a meltdown. It is highly reassuring to know that the Three Mile Island unit #2 containment building did better than that—it contained a hydrogen explosion without difficulty.
But even if the gases did somehow get out, a very special weather situation would be needed before massive loss of life would occur; and even then it is unlikely that the toll could be as large as that threatening several U.S. cities with far higher probability if a dam above them failed (more than 100,000 fatalities).
A meltdown is, of course, extremely dangerous and I hope none will ever happen; but it is not the ultimate catastrophe depicted by the anti-nuclear scaremongers.
Petr Beckmann
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado
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To the Editor:
Apropos Samuel McCracken’s observation that “the anti-nuclear movement is certainly heartened by the ‘disaster’ [at Three Mile Island],” shortly after the event, Dick Cavett explained to one of his guests that he “loved Three Mile Island” because of its impact on pro-nuclear advocates. There really would have to be someone skilled in poetic expression to offer a description of Cavett’s gleeful body-language accompanying this remark. Just imagine someone saying that he loved the Gulag because of what it would do to the defenders of Stalin! . . .
Tibor R. Machan
Santa Barbara, California
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To the Editor:
Samuel McCracken argues in convincing fashion that “The China Syndrome is . . . a consistent act of fabrication.” Yet what we find disturbing is not the fabrication, but . . . the film’s powerful and insidious effect: as the dramatic tension rises, the viewer finds himself taking an extreme stand on the complex issue of nuclear power. We fear that when the viewer must consider this issue as a citizen, Jack Lemmon’s blood and Jane Fonda’s tears will displace a rational analysis of the pertinent scientific, economic, and social factors.
The effect of Michael Douglas’s film upon many of our Harvard classmates illustrates what we find disturbing. Two weeks after The China Syndrome opened, several petitions circulated on campus demanding a ten-year moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants and an immediate closing of existing plants. Those distributing the petitions would talk about the issues only in the argot of their movement. Many were convinced of the cogency of the argument that “if there is any question about nuclear safety, why not shut down the nuclear industry and instead develop solar power?” Yet there was no discussion of the technical or economic problems associated with the development of solar power (or of other sources of energy). Instead, there was protest without understanding. . . .
Mr. McCracken has done more than simply identify the many distortions and inaccuracies of Douglas’s film. He has described a process whereby . . . stark and simple images have replaced complex realities.
Michael Aaron Weiss
Stanley David Weiss
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Having been educated as an engineer as well as a psychologist, I found myself in agreement with the viewpoint, if not the conclusions, of Samuel McCracken’s article. I was taken aback, however, by his report of a nuclear engineer’s agreement with the “suggestion that a klaxon sound sharply during illegal operation,” even when such operation might be necessary to keep things from getting worse. A loud noise can significantly reduce the operator’s decision-making capacity. . . . The proposed klaxon would cause slower decisions, a higher likelihood of error, or both. Unfortunately, the engineers who designed the plant at Three Mile Island may have been as ignorant of human factors as Mr. McCracken’s interlocutor. The indicators and controls facing the operator appear to have been so confusing that the plant was, from the beginning, a “human error waiting to happen.” The error that did finally happen was probably caused by inconsistent indicators: green for open and red for closed for some valves; the reverse for others.
Avoiding another accident like the one at Harrisburg calls for a redesigned control system incorporating unambiguous displays and controls, as well as an interlock system with emergency override switches built into the control levers. Courses in man-machine systems should be incorporated in nuclear engineering curricula, so that nuclear engineers will know when they need to consult with a human-factors engineer or an engineering psychologist. Most important of all, the management must be provided with a financial incentive for safe operation. Such incentives are normally provided by a linkage between safety practices and insurance rates. Under the Price-Anderson Act, however, insurance for the nuclear-power industry is provided by a government-sponsored consortium which, unlike private insurers, is not allowed to link insurance rates to safe operation. This is justified to the public on the grounds that the NRC has sole authority over nuclear safety. Unfortunately, government regulation, even when it works, can only secure minimal adherence to minimum standards. Nuclear power does indeed have the potential for becoming the safest large-scale energy technology possible, but this potential will not be realized as long as a linkage between safety and insurance rates is prevented. . . .
Adam V. Reedy
New School for Social Research
New York City
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To the Editor:
Samuel McCracken refers to the Creative Initiative Foundation in footnote 7 of his article. The Creative Initiative Foundation is a nonprofit educational foundation in Palo Alto, California. Our membership includes many professional, engineering, and management people in the San Francisco Bay Area and other locations in the United States.
The Creative Initiative Foundation was formed in 1968 to pursue worldwide education concerning the changes needed in attitudes of individuals in order to survive meaningfully in this age. It has always existed and worked as an independent entity. Specifically, in reference to footnote 7, the Creative Initiative Foundation has never been connected with Project Survival, as Mr. McCracken states, either as its parent or otherwise.
Donald F. Lundgren
Palo Alto, California
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To the Editor:
Samuel McCracken’s article shows that the extremists on both sides of the nuclear issue overstate their cases to the confusion of decent people who know how to read.
On the basis of the study of materials coming from both sides and, more important, from serious scientists and economists who stand in the middle, I have learned that:
- Uranium is in such short supply and so high-priced that it is now barely competitive with OPEC oil.
- Furthermore, known uranium reserves will be substantially depleted by the present rate of usage early in the next century.
- Capital cost overruns and the cost of additional safety precautions mandated by the NRC, as well as the nuclear fuel situation, have raised serious questions as to the “economies” of nuclear power.
- From the long-range economic viewpoint—considered today with 20-20 hindsight—we have devoted too many dollars to nuclear power, and too few to solar power and coal.
- The breeder reactor, according to reliable technologists, is still too dangerous and may never solve our power problem.
- Nuclear-waste problems are still unsolved—that is, we do not yet know how to store nuclear waste safely for the next few millennia and how to move it safely from the reactor to its eventual resting place.
Mr. McCracken’s failure to take up any of these points is some indication that his pro-nuclearism is just as extreme and oversimplified as the anti-nuclearism of The China Syndrome. . . .
Harold Manheim
New York City
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To the Editor:
I have read Samuel McCracken’s “The Harrisburg Syndrome” and his previous article on nuclear power [“The War Against the Atom,” September 1977]. I would appreciate his responses to several points.
1. Mr. McCracken ridicules the Union of Concerned Scientists for touting past emergency-core-cooling-system failures while ignoring a recent success. While the 1970-71 loss-of-coolant-accident tests were not solely for the purpose of testing the ECCS, the fact is that the ECCS repeatedly failed to work as predicted. This failure was serious enough for the Atomic Energy Commission to order a special inhouse review of the ECCS.
Mr. McCracken’s position is no less perfidious than the one he ascribes to the UCS: Mr. McCracken himself did not accept the earlier tests showing ECCS failure but now demands that the UCS reverse its position based on one success. Rational advocates of nuclear power have, on a number of occasions, expressed admiration for the UCS’s role in improving the ECCS design, especially in the bumbling AEC climate of the early 1970’s. Even though AEC studies identified the ECCS as a critical component of reactor safety, ten years later we have a mixture of test results showing some failures, some successes, and a lot less assurance than we need.
2. One area sorely needing attention at some point in Mr. McCracken’s spirited defense of nuclear economics is the massive and continuing federal subsidy for nuclear power. In 1978, according to the General Accounting Office, federal taxpayers contributed 6.2 mills for each kilowatt-hour generated from nuclear plants, 40 per cent of the commercial cost—a subsidy which has been increasing in recent years. Including breeder, but not military, expenditures, Battelle Laboratories calculates federal subsidies to commercial nuclear power at $1.83 per million BTU, or 20 mills per kilowatt-hour—a staggering 120 per cent of commercial cost. Using either estimate, the economics of nuclear power have a definite “Made in Washington” stamp on them.
True, many private activities have benefited from an initial government boost—but after twenty-five years, taxpayer assistance at a 40 percent clip (with no end in sight) ‘is getting a bit old. True, other energy sources also receive a subsidy. Coal, for example, including all federal research-and-development, black-lung payments, and advance-system research, received a subsidy of roughly $1.25 per ton in 1978, or 0.7 mills per kilowatt-hour—9 times less than nuclear’s largesse.
3. Mr. McCracken asserts that “solutions for radioactive-waste storage have already been found” and that nuclear critics’ failure to acknowledge this is the “major moral scandal of the movement.” I expected Mr. McCracken to follow this assertion with some hard evidence of long-term nuclear waste-handling success to offset all the stories we hear about leakage, sometimes by the railroad-tank-carful, from storage projects so far built. And what does Mr. McCracken offer? That France has just started up a vitrification plant (no data presented) and Germany will “soon” open a repository. Since every known nuclear project has operated perfectly at projected cost unmarred by any unexpected complications, Mr. McCracken has certainly proved major moral scandal.
Mr. McCracken’s failure to apply his well-developed skepticism to such items as this is certainly puzzling. I commend to him the observation of Dr. Mason Willrich, certainly no nuclear critic, that tempting and too-quick claims of proven success in nuclear-waste management amount to no more than “an illusion of certainty.” Real success can be claimed only after the long haul.
Willrich’s conclusions regarding nuclear-waste management are owed some weight since they have been reviewed and endorsed by such luminaries as Drs. Norman Rasmussen and David J. Rose. Willrich, and the recent report of the Interagency Review Group, conclude that the nuclear-waste problem may well be solvable—even given a long and gloomy list of major uncertainties clearly showing the difficulties, institutional changes, and costs involved—but they do not claim it has been solved or that a solution is imminent. Responsible nuclear advocates seem to realize that sounding the clarion too soon will only reinforce public cynicism built by a decade of exaggerated nuclear promises.
Further, Willrich (“Radioactive waste management will be a continuing challenge for government throughout the nuclear age and perhaps for many centuries beyond”), the IRG (“Disposal may prove difficult to implement in practice and may involve residual risks for future generations which may be significant”), and the Energy Research and Development Administration’s chief of waste management have all admitted that future generations may be obliged to bear the costs and risks of our atomic enterprise. If Mr. McCracken is interested in major moral scandals, here surely is one.
4. A related area deserving of more skepticism from Mr. McCracken is the current set of glib estimates for nuclear-waste disposal and decommissioning. The figures Mr. McCracken cites, without analysis, do indeed include minimal costs assigned to such longterm tasks, but there is little reason to believe that they are accurate. Solemn 1962 estimates placed long-term nuclear-management costs for the West Valley reprocessing plant at $4 million—a projection which in 1978 seems a mere 100 to 200 times too low, and may be much, much more than that. Estimates for managing used military-nuclear facilities jumped from a few hundred million in the late 1960’s to $20 billion today with no end in sight. New Jersey Public Service Electric and Gas recently judged that decommissioning its Oyster Creek reactor would cost 35 per cent, in constant dollars, of that plant’s capital cost.
If Mr. McCracken is looking for a real moral scandal, he should probe the congressional hearings on West Valley costs in which the NRC’s Dr. Clifford Smith admitted current electricity rates for nuclear plants “do not reflect the total and ultimate cost of disposing of nuclear waste perpetually”—which means those costs will fall disproportionately either to future consumers or, worse, to future generations who receive no benefit from the plant.
The types of estimates used by Mr. McCracken usually are based on Atomic Industrial Forum figures (which, among other things, omit such minor factors as inflation, contingencies, and Murphy’s Law) and formulas which permit 50-year-old nuclear companies to “entomb” nuclear plants for 100 to 150 years before final dismantlement, financed by a sinking fund made up of minimal-estimate contribution—à la West Valley. How the NRC can guarantee the financial ability of either the company or its financial institutions—given the hundreds of thousands of U.S. businesses which have failed since 1940 alone—is a mystery to all. One thing is sure, however: according to the AIF, nuclear plants will remain dangerous for 234,000 to 505,000 years if not dismantled, and current funding practices indicate future generations will be picking up both the risk and the tab.
One more moral scandal for Mr. McCracken to investigate—those of anti-nuclear activists pale by comparison.
5. Yet another savage misrepresentation is the way some nuclear proponents, with Mr. McCracken’s assistance and the unquestioning allegiance of such publications as National Review, have pinned primary responsibility for nuclear cost increases on the critics. True, legal delays and other interventionist challenges do add to nuclear costs—but they account for fewer than 5 per cent of the cost increases, according to best estimates. A 1973 Federal Power Commission study revealed the remaining 95 per cent of the cost increases are caused by utility and industry delays, rescheduling, strikes, late delivery of parts, breakdowns, financial troubles, and other management problems. A 1976 follow-up study produced nearly identical results, and its author concluded, “legal challenges, environmental reviews, and public participation in the existing process simply have not been statistically significant” causes of delay.
True, an environmental group did file suit to bring nuclear plants under National Environmental Policy Act review—but Mr. McCracken’s real target here (assuming it is his position that nuclear plants should be immune from NEPA) is Congress, which passed NEPA and has not exempted nuclear projects through that same “democratic process” he praises in other contexts. True, environmental-review criteria do raise the cost of nuclear plants, especially when they change in midstream, but if Mr. McCracken is going to blame this on environmentalists and nuclear opponents, he is going to have to show—on a case-by-case basis—which environmental factors are unnecessary and attributable to nuclear opponents and how much they cost to enforce. Neither Mr. McCracken nor any other nuclear advocate has shown that, to my knowledge.
For Mr. McCracken and others to insist that nuclear opponents are the major cause of nuclear cost increases—in the absence of documentation and the presence of several studies which indicate just the opposite—is surely the epitome of moral scandal. The best correlation (from William Mooz, now with the UCS, so Mr. McCracken probably won’t give him much credibility) is between nuclear cost increases and the number of orders processed by regulators and industry—a simple supply/demand correlation which incidentally explains the slowdown in nuclear inflation as due to the slowdown in nuclear orders, despite the fact that public interventions have never been higher than today.
6. When Mr. McCracken mentions nuclear referenda, he might include the strict set of nuclear restrictions approved by 65 per cent of Montana’s voters in the 1978 general election. This approval came despite an opposition campaign financed by nearly 100 major nuclear utilities and corporations which spent more against the measure than has been spent on any ballot issue in modern Montana history. While Montana is not a typical state (which is?), neither can a state which voted heavily for Gerald Ford in 1976 be called radically environmentalist.
Finally, I chuckled when I read Mr. McCracken’s comment that some nuclear opponents would be horrified at the prospect of a solution to the nuclear-waste problem. Probably true, in the same way some nuclear advocates would be horrified at a solar breakthrough. I believe such a nuclear-waste “solution” (or a solar breakthrough) would be occasion for much rejoicing on both sides, and I hope Mr. McCracken is charitable enough to concede the critics at least that much. . . .
Mike A. Males
Helena, Montana
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Samuel Mccracken writes:
It is always heartening to receive praise and enlightening commentary from Petr Beckmann, God’s angry, but rational, man on energy as on so many other issues. His newsletter, Access to Energy, remains an irreplaceable national resource for the layman who wants to understand what energy is all about.
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Tibor R. Machan is quite right. Nuclear energy has become, among the New Class, what Nazism is among decent folk, something whose badness is too obvious to mention. But one cannot imagine a 1945 Cavett saying that he “loved” the revelations coming out of Auschwitz. Not, of course, that Three Mile Island is really the equivalent of the Gulag or the extermination camps. Its hideousness is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
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Michael Aaron Weiss and Stanley David Weiss make a very valuable comment: the anti-nuclear madness is related to an abdication of reasoned discourse that blights discussion and implementation of policy in many other areas. This, I believe, is partially because as the educated become increasingly intolerant of dissent within their own ranks, they tend to treat ideas as one great collocation of meta-clichés. Given my heretical views on nuclear energy, I must constantly explain that I am not (a) a nuclear engineer or (b) a conservative, not to say a card-carrying fascist. This is really rather strange, for technology used to be the opiate of the intellectuals. One need only recall Lenin’s dictum that “Soviet power plus electrification equals Communism.” In the West, the late Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean” of Canterbury, used to produce paeans to electricity that would now affront most intellectuals, wherever the electricity was coming from. One does not meet many intellectuals who support nuclear energy, and this is in large part because intellectuals increasingly wield a bundle of only superficially related beliefs that are bound together as tightly and as externally as the rods in the Roman fasces.
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Adam V. Reed and I are probably in greater agreement than seems apparent from his letter (although I should point out that my viewpoint is not that of an engineer, but of a Chaucer scholar). By “klaxon” I meant no more than an audible signal that operating-room personnel would have difficulty in ignoring. A sudden—and easily quieted—burst of Mozart would do as well. Moreover, I would agree that nuclear control rooms ought to reflect our best understanding of human-factor engineering and hold no brief that they already do. One of the most unfortunate effects of anti-nuclear extremism is possibly to inhibit the development of the sort of rational improvements advocated by Mr. Reed, who seems to be exemplary of the kind of critic nuclear power needs.
I am less certain about the malign influence of the Price-Anderson Act on safety, largely because Price-Anderson covers only public liability, and not damage to reactors. If it were possible to combine NRC minimum standards, compliance with which is necessary for licensing, with underwriter-developed higher standards for reduced premiums, that would seem reasonable enough. The problem is to be entirely sure that the insurance company regulations do not conflict with and dilute the NRC ones. It is not likely that insurance companies will develop expertise in nuclear safety as long as they have no need of it for rate-setting. But the idea—even for liability insurance—is worth exploring, possibly through funded research by Underwriters Laboratories.
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I am grateful for Donald F. Lundgren’s suave “clarification” of the relation between the Creative Initiative Foundation and Project Survival. For my original statement of the relation between the two, I relied on a lengthy published interview with William Burch, described as the first president of Project Survival as well as the president of the Creative Initiative Foundation. In the interview, Mr. Burch was quoted as giving a clear account of the genesis of Project Survival: the Creative Initiative Foundation had begun to get deeply interested in fighting nuclear power, and in early 1975 members of the Foundation set up Project Survival, supplying it with money as individuals and turning over to it research that had been accomplished by the Foundation. Mr. Burch was twice quoted as explaining the importance of formally separating the tax-exempt “educational” Creative Initiative Foundation from the non-exempt “political” Project Survival. I suspect Mr. Lundgren writes in the same spirit. Perhaps I should have said that Project Survival was the natural child of the Creative Initiative Foundation, but if the account on which I relied was inaccurate—a question on which Mr. Lundgren’s letter sheds no light—I am happy to stand corrected.
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Both Harold Manheim and Mike A. Males raise the question of radioactive waste, albeit in rather different ways. Let me deal with this broad issue before proceeding to the rest of their comments.
Mr. Manheim’s claim that we do not know how to deal with waste, repeated passim and ad infinitum, has the kind of vitality and widespread uncritical acceptance otherwise vouchsafed only to such phrases as “the dog is a noble animal.” The elevated company it keeps does not, however, make it true. Writing in these pages [“A Tale of Two Wastes,” November 1978] Bernard L. Cohen has shown the triviality of the nuclear-waste problem, especially as compared to the serious and unsolved difficulties inherent in disposing of waste from coal.
Messrs. Manheim and Males (along with 99.44 per cent of all those who discuss the topic of waste disposal publicly) confuse two very different requirements. One is the technological necessity of developing sound programs for managing radioactive wastes, and the other is the political necessity to choose such a means from among those technology develops. The former has been accomplished, but in this country the latter remains to be done. It is as if people went about saying, “We have no idea how to make an airliner that will fly faster than the speed of sound,” ignoring the existence of the Concorde. (Lest I be misunderstood here, I should add that the mere existence of the Concorde does not in itself disprove the statement, “We have no idea how to make a commercially successful airliner that will fly faster than the speed of sound.”)
Although I have discussed the issue in these pages before (I am amazed that Mr. Manheim should castigate me for ignoring it when I explicitly addressed it in my June article), the topic is important enough for recapitulation. Let me begin by laying out some of the details of the waste-management process.
As the nuclear reaction proceeds in the core of a reactor, in addition to the liberation of energy, some of the atoms in the fuel rods are transmuted into a wide variety of radioactive isotopes. With the exception of plutonium, these are essentially useless. Plutonium is not waste at all, but immensely valuable—the most valuable—fuel. After some months of operation, the waste products begin to affect the efficiency of the fuel rod, and it is removed from the reactor and replaced with a fresh one. Beside the waste products and plutonium, the spent rod contains unfissioned uranium. It is intensely radioactive and physically hot as well.
The spent rod is immersed in a tank of water near the reactor, where it gradually becomes less hot in both senses. It should be understood that length of half-life and intensity of radiation are inversely proportional. If a radioactive isotope has a half-life of one second, one-half of the atoms in any quantity of it will disintegrate each second, creating intense radioactivity. On the other hand, any given quantity will be essentially annihilated in about ten seconds. If a radioactive substance has a half-life of a million years, it will take one million years for one-half of the atoms in a given quantity to disintegrate. This is a very slow rate of disintegration, and produces a much lower level of radiation. In fuel rods, the various radioactive isotopes decay at a rate proportional to their radioactivity, the hottest ones most rapidly, and the level of total radioactivity in the fuel drops sharply.
The foregoing paragraph, regrettably, describes the entire operational U.S. nuclear-waste-management program as presently conducted. The steps that should follow it have been suspended by order of the federal government. There is no reason in theory why we cannot continue this way indefinitely, given the building of additional storage capacity, but there are two very good reasons why we should not. First, the plutonium and uranium in the rods represent an immense fuel resource; and second, as the rods cool, the plutonium becomes increasingly accessible to thieves.
The next step should be reprocessing: the dissolving of the fuel rods and the extraction of the plutonium and uranium for use as fuel. Our present suspension of reprocessing makes impossible the implementation of a rational waste-management strategy. Until recently, it was proposed to bury spent fuel rods, still containing large amounts of uranium and plutonium, at a site in New Mexico. This dubious plan has been withdrawn, but nothing has been adopted in its place, although the NRC has begun to work out plans for developing criteria of choice. This development, little as it is, is at least an improvement over past inaction.
After reprocessing should come calcination/ vitrification, whereby the liquid waste is converted to a sand-like material, and made into glass. And, finally, the vitrified waste should be entombed in geologically stable formations. After about a thousand years, the level of radioactivity in the glass falls away to a point lower than that of the uranium ore from which the waste was originally derived. That is, over thousand-year spans, the effect of a light-water reactor is to reduce the level of radiation in the world. A breeder reactor, which annihilates uranium atoms at a faster rate, reduces radiation even faster.
This chain of events, from spent fuel rods to glassified waste, is not simply a proposal or even a pilot project. All the steps except entombment are now in use on a commercial scale in France, and that final step simply awaits the cooling down of the vitrified waste to a temperature satisfactory for further handling.
As it happens, most of the liquefied waste now stored in this country is from the weapons program (so that the necessity for successful waste management would remain even if every power reactor in the country were shut down tomorrow), and the major spills of liquid waste have been from archaic and obsolete storage facilities designed during World War II. The important point is that we have large amounts of liquid waste on hand because of our failure to adopt a strategy for permanent storage; thirty-year storage of liquid high-level waste is not essential to waste management in a world that knows the vitrification process or alternatives now under development, e.g., the conversion of liquid waste to a ceramic form.
Mr. Males, having misrepresented accidents in the storage of largely military waste as somehow relevant to a mature system of civilian waste management, complains that I have not provided data on the French program at Marcoule. This is rather like saying that I have not provided evidence that the Concorde really does exceed the speed of sound. I don’t know what I can do to convince Mr. Males that this major facility exists, short of taking him to France to see it. I might also note that vitrified waste produced in a large British pilot program as long ago as 1966 was recently examined and found to be in original condition, a result confirming earlier accelerated-aging tests.
Mr. Males quotes me as saying that Germany will “soon” open a repository, but I said no such thing: I merely noted that the Gorleben facility is “well along in development” and made no estimate when it will be in operation. Recently the governor of the German state in which Gorleben is located put the whole project on hold, for the explicit reason that it was politically—not technically—too controversial.
Now, if nuclear critics were to allege specific inadequacies in the vitrification process (as a very few have, usually only of certain elements in it), I might disagree, but would not think it a moral scandal. But I persist in believing that this is the right phrase for the cover-up, which continues more or less unabated.
I would agree with Mason Will-rich that it is misleading to claim actuality for proposals, a habit which is extremely common among proponents of “alternative” energy sources, but the French operation is not a proposal, it is an actuality. And if real success in nuclear-waste management can be claimed only after the long haul, the same is true, given a long-haul process under way, for real failure. Willrich’s 1977 book on waste management limited itself entirely to the United States, and discussed the vitrification process entirely in its tentative U.S. state, rather than in the more highly developed forms evident in Britain and France.
The residual risks to future generations from nuclear-waste disposal are tiny compared to those inherent in our consumption of petrochemical feed-stocks for fuel. Any energy policy based on fossil fuels is a policy that will, in the long run, deprive future generations of the chemical basis of modern society into the bargain. If the policy also forswears the nuclear option, it will sharply limit future access to energy more concentrated than that produced in wood-burning stoves and the bodies of mammals. There is a scandal indeed.
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Mr. Manheim’s letter as a whole is an aggravated example of a familiar complaint, namely, that an author has written the article he has written rather than some other article. In this case, Mr. Manheim appears to be objecting to the fact that I have written an article about Three Mile Island, rather than a general piece on the problem of nuclear energy. The aggravation comes in the fact that I have published just such a piece in these very pages [“The War Against the Atom,” September 1977], and explicitly referred to it in my more recent piece. As it happens, I dealt with each of Mr. Manheim’s points two years ago, but let me have another go at them.
1. The price of OPEC oil is a moving target, but I know of no energy economist of any persuasion who would agree with Mr. Manheim that uranium is “barely” competitive with OPEC oil. As a fuel (ignoring capital costs) uranium “yellow-cake” at $43 a pound is the equivalent of oil at $3 a barrel. (A standard 500-kilogram barrel of yellow-cake supplies electricity for a town of 8,000 for a year.) Electricity from nuclear plants is still considerably cheaper than that from oil-fired ones, even after nuclear has absorbed its substantially higher capital costs.
2. The short answer is that the “known reserves” of oil and indeed of many other minerals will be “substantially depleted” by early in the next century. But the known reserves keep increasing, especially in response to rising uranium prices. For example, at present prices it has become economical to “comb through” uranium mill tailings and extract residues once left as worthless. Environmental regulations, naturally, make it very difficult to pursue this process, but even so, at least one determined uranium firm is succeeding in reducing a giant tailings pile and gaining a new domestic energy source thereby. For another example, recent estimates place South African reserves at 355,000 metric tonnes at $30 a pound, but 625,000 tonnes at $50 a pound. The supply expands almost precisely in step with the price. This is not, of course, because of any conspiracy, but because higher prices justify working thinner deposits.
And we need not limit ourselves to U-235, the fissionable isotope. Of U-238, the fertile isotope, suitable for use in fast reactors, we have several centuries’ worth already mined and lying presently useless near enrichment plants, with very much greater supplies still in the ground. “Natural” uranium, it must be remembered, contains about 150 times as much U-238 as U-235. Finally, fast reactors can also be run on thorium, which is much more plentiful than uranium.
3. The various charges mentioned by Mr. Manheim are already being paid for by electric ratepayers on their bills, and nuclear power is still almost always cheaper than the alternative. Customers of Boston Edison can track the refueling cycle of the Pilgrim I reactor by watching the undulations of the fuel-adjustment charge on their bills.
4. Judgments of this sort are sustainable only by the question-begging process of declaring nuclear energy unsatisfactory and its alternatives satisfactory. If coal and solar power were more desirable energy sources than nuclear, Mr. Manheim would be quite right. But he has not proved his case that they are.
5. Mr. Manheim does not name his “reliable technologists,” but they appear to be ignorant of flourishing British and French breeder programs. Many American critics of nuclear power appear to believe that the stumbling breeder program that finally died with the Fermi plant near Detroit was the only one ever attempted anywhere, and that the development of breeder power depends on the controversial Clinch River project.
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Let me take up the rest of the points raised by Mr. Males seriatim, by his numbers.
1. He badly misunderstands my objection to the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists on the LOFT tests. First of all, I did not regard the earlier series of tests as definitively proving the ECCS unreliable, because they did not in fact test the ECCS in a simulation of an operating, full-sized plant. But I have no ethical objection whatsoever to the UCS citing these tests as raising doubts about the reliability of the ECCS. What I do object to is a UCS mailing which, well after the December 10 test, stated that the LOFT tests had consistently failed. This statement, not to put too fine a point on it, is a lie. I do not, as Mr. Males suggests, demand “that the UCS reverse its position based on one [now two] success[es],” but I do expect the sort of honesty one expects from direct-mail merchants.
2. Mr. Males’s cost studies (I have not been able to trace the GAO study, even at the GAO) charge all federal spending on nuclear energy, including ongoing research, to the electricity now being generated. That is, they illegitimately add to the cost of electricity being generated in 1979 research into how we will be generating electricity in 2025. Moreover, the Battelle report does not exclude military expenditure, for it adds in the cost of fuel enrichment plants built for bombs and now fortuitously amortized by civilian payments for enrichment. Even on this preposterous assumption, the “subsidy” to nuclear energy is about the same as that given to hydropower, and much less than that given to oil. Amortized over thirty years, it would work out to 10 per cent of the price of nuclear energy, not the 120 per cent claimed by Males. The actual federal expenditure on light-water technology has been $3 billion, and the real subsidy is thus no more than 2 per cent of the price of the electricity. For this small premium—much less the price advantage of nuclear over oil—we displace hundreds of millions of barrels of OPEC oil each year. Clearly a bargain.
4. Escalating estimates of the cost of cleaning up after the bungled West Valley plant is a favorite anti-nuclear parlor game, always presented without analysis or documentation, and Mr. Males’s figure is among the highest I have ever seen. He neglects to mention that the wastes at West Valley are almost entirely military, and largely irrelevant to any discussion of civilian nuclear-power programs.
Mr. Males’s assertions about the Oyster Creek plant are even more interesting. First of all, it is owned not by New Jersey Public Service Electric and Gas, but by Jersey Central Power and Light. Next, this utility’s estimate for the decommissioning of the Oyster Creek plant ($35 million in 1969 dollars) was derived for the purpose of establishing a rate base charge for decommissioning. In order to provide this sum by the time it is needed, the amount added to the cost of electricity is about one-third of a mill—that is, a thirtieth of a cent—per kilowatt-hour.
It is interesting that Mr. Males does not cite the amount of this charge, which is sufficient to pay what he suggests is the very heavy cost of decommissioning, and which thus illustrates the important truth that it is possible to build up very large sums indeed if one can collect a little bit of money from a lot of people over a long period of time. But, of course, Mr. Males is not interested in showing that decommissioning costs are tolerable, and already being met in the rate base.
But this is not his only sleight-of-hand, for he singles out Oyster Creek, a comparatively large plant built just before the great price rise in nuclear plants, and therefore certain to yield an abnormally high ratio of decommissioning to construction cost. Decommissioning one large reactor is much like decommissioning another, and the $100 million it would cost in 1997 to decommission the $110 million Oyster Creek plant would, at 7 per cent annual inflation, rise to about $200 million in 2009, sufficient to decommission a $1 billion plant that had gone into operation in the early 1980’s. This would be not 35 per cent of capital cost, but 20 per cent. And that would have been generated in the cheapest way possible, by comparatively small additions to a sinking fund over a generation.
Pace Mr. Males, my figures are not from the AIF, but rather from the Department of Energy, which estimates the cost of decommissioning at between .32 and .69 mills per kilowatt-hour.
But the bogus nature of the decommissioning issue does not reside purely in such smooth manipulation of figures as practiced by Mr. Males. For one thing, there is no reliable information on the useful life of a mature nuclear-power plant, only assumptions made for depreciation purposes. The estimates for Oyster Creek, for example, assumed a useful life for the plant of thirty years, which is historically reasonable. But it may turn out to be useful for fifty years; we will be lucky indeed if we develop an energy source that makes nuclear power obsolete before then.
Moreover, it is important to understand the true scope of the problem presented by a retired nuclear plant. First, the chain reaction having been forever stopped, there is no production of new radioactivity, and the remaining level will drop steadily. Second, the core having been removed for reprocessing and waste disposal, the overwhelming majority of the radiation hazard in an operating plant—the fission products—will be gone. The residual radiation will issue from so-called “activation products.” These are produced when nuclei of non-radioactive elements, mostly in the structure of the reactor itself—for example, the iron in the reactor vessel—and also in comparatively trivial amounts of impurities from coolant water lodged in the piping—so-called “crud”—capture neutrons from the chain reaction. They are then transmuted into unstable, hence radioactive, elements. These vary as to half-life, those with half-lives between about 23,000 and 50,000 years accounting for the figures attributed by Mr. Males to the AIF. (An AIF spokesman was unaware of the organization’s having made any such statement, although he noted that some of the longest-lived—and therefore least radioactive—activation products have half-lives in these ranges.)
It should be understood that these radioactive elements are not lying around on the floor as dust or blowing out the windows of the former plant as gas. They are entombed, as it were, in the structure of the reactor steam-supply system, and they are of no use to anyone, no matter how evilly intentioned. The most depraved and capable terrorist group imaginable would have no use for an only moderately radioactive pressure vessel weighing many tons. No dictator could fabricate a bomb from activated steel piping smuggled out of a retired plant. In this context, it is a little hard to understand why anyone thinks it necessary to dismantle former plants and bury them as waste. Entombing them in concrete seems extraordinarily cautious, and the fact is that probably a chain-link fence bearing the radiation symbol ought to be enough to prevent their causing any harm for the full length of their existence. We can afford to envision actually dismantling such plants and carting them away because the cost even of that complex operation, amortized in advance over a generation, is trivial.
5. Mr. Males’s discussion of the extent to which nuclear opponents contribute to cost overruns is, to use no stronger term, flawed. First of all, I have never claimed that intervention is the major cause of cost increases. That is, the assumption on which he builds his discussion of my alleged intellectual misbehavior and what I should do to correct it is based on a simple falsifiction of the public record.
In my first article, I suggested that it was hypocritical for nuclear opponents to engage in delaying tactics of the sort used against the Seabrook plant and at the same time decry cost increases. In the exchange of letters that followed that article [Letters from Readers, December 1977], a correspondent cited an article by I.C. Bupp of Harvard as proving that nuclear opponents had no role in cost increases. I properly replied that to the contrary, the article in question listed a number of cases of cost increases made necessary by environmentalists, and identified delays in the licensing process—whether caused by environmentalist intervention or not—as the single most important contribution to costs. If Mr. Males is going to be so severe on me, he ought to state my position accurately. His failure to do so, although not quite the “epitome of moral scandal” he lays at my door, is surely shabby practice, as is his claim that all studies exonerate nuclear opponents from blame in increasing costs.
As to my attitude toward the environmental protection law: given the grosser lunacies of this legislation, it would probably be desirable to make just about everything immune from it. One could make an especially good case for this with regard to nuclear-power plants, which are more environmentally benign than the alternative. But Congress has obviously had, and rejected, the opportunity to do so, and I am content that when environmentalists use the law to hamstring nuclear power, they are within the law.
It is impossible for any one person to undertake the case-by-case review Mr. Males suggests, given the complexities of the cases of 168 separate reactors completed or partially licensed. (I doubt that very many environmentalists, however committed, are in any position to approve all the challenges on a case-by-case basis.) However, I can suggest to him categories of challenge that seem to me very dubious. First, all those made in the hope not of improving but of fatally delaying or canceling nuclear plants; on any occasion when a nuclear plant is replaced by a fossil-fuel one, the result is a major environmental disaster. Second, all those sincerely made but in accordance with such dubious notions as the bogus threat of “thermal pollution” or the assumption that fish have superior rights to people. And, finally, all those which, through inadequate weighing of all considerations—that is, through being in fact inadequately environmental—end up inflicting greater costs than benefits delivered, e.g., further dependence on OPEC oil, lowered air quality.
I am not prepared to apply these criteria to each and every licensing process in the country, but I suggest that most of the challenges against the Seabrook plant, as well as all of the so-called nuclear-safeguard referenda, fail on these criteria.
6. I have not discussed nuclear referenda in general since my September 1977 article (I did mention the San Antonio referendum as an artifact of the Three Mile Island backwash), and am at a loss to know how Mr. Males expects that I would have known then that Montana would pass an anti-nuclear referendum a year later. But OK. After six states have refused to pass an anti-nuclear referendum, one state has. If Mr. Males thinks this is a significant change, he is welcome to the belief.
7. I would agree that a solar breakthrough—that is, one that might enable solar power to achieve its present inflated promises—would be a very good thing. I am not merely charitable enough—I am realistic enough—to admit that some nuclear critics would rejoice if and when they became convinced that the waste problem was solved. But I still think that the widespread preference for the assertion that “we have no idea how to dispose of nuclear wastes” over an analysis of existing technologies suggests strongly that some people in the anti-nuclear movement have a vested interest in maintaining what appears to be their strongest argument.
