SOCRATES
LOOKS AT NUCLEAR WASTE

THEODORE ROCKWELL

How good are the safeguards in the US nuclear power industry?

Socrates would have loved the Cosmos Club. He delighted in discussing the Big Questions. He didn’t try to persuade people by pushing arguments in his favor. He just asked simple, basic questions that most people felt were too obvious to dwell on. But by asking them, he revealed hidden premises that needed further probing. Socrates generally liked to talk with two or more people with differing, even opposing views. I could picture him discussing the problem of nuclear waste. Since Cosmos Club members cover a wide variety of views on any topic, we’ll supply Socrates with Dr. Proh, who sees no serious problems with nuclear technology, and Dr. Kahn, who feels the problems outweigh the advantages.

Socrates:Why is nuclear waste a problem?
Dr. Kahn: Because we don’t know what to do with it.
S: Why do we have to do something with it?
K: Because it’s dangerous.
S: Bicycles and stairs kill people. Does nuclear waste kill or injure people?
K: No, but it can.
S: How can nuclear waste kill?
K: If it leaks into water that may be used for drinking.
S: Is nuclear waste liquid?
K: Sure. There are those huge tanks at Hanford, Washington.
S: Does Hanford store waste from civilian facilities?
Dr. Proh: No, virtually none; just weapons waste.
S: So if we never built any nuclear power plants, it wouldn’t change the situation at Hanford.
K: Correct.
S: What form is the waste from power plants?
P: Either spent fuel or miscellaneous waste products. We really shouldn’t call spent fuel waste. Only 3 percent of the fuel has been used; the rest is available for recycling.
S: Are any of these materials liquid?
P: No, the fuel is hard ceramic pellets in metal tubes. The waste is consolidated into a solid—glass, concrete, or bitumen. There may be some noble gases, but they are biologically inert and, thus, no real problem.
S: So there is no leakage problem from power plant wastes, correct?
K: Well, some might leach out.
S: Do you really think much can leach out from glass or metal-clad ceramic?
K: No, not really.
S: Why then is civilian nuclear waste dangerous?
K: It stays lethal for thousands of years.
S: Doesn’t nuclear waste continually decrease in toxicity?
K: Yes.
S: How does that compare with non-radioactive poisons like mercury, lead, and arsenic?
P: Their toxicity stays undiminished forever.
K: We have enough nuclear waste already to kill millions of people.
P: That’s meaningless. A municipal swimming pool has enough water to kill a million people.
S: How does production of nuclear waste compare with the annual US production of other toxic materials?
P: The annual US production of barium could kill 100 billion people; hydrogen cyanide 6,000 billion; ammonia 6,000 billion; chlorine gas 400,000 billion people; and the list goes on.
S: We don’t seem threatened by these, do we?
K: But we keep increasing world’s radioactivity, no?
S: Let’s see.Where does nuclear waste originate?
P: From the fissionable isotope of uranium.
S: So we take a naturally radioactive material and convert it to fission products with mostly shorter halflives. What’s the ultimate effect of that on Earth?
P: In the long run, we make Earth less radioactive.
S: Any other problems?
K: Well, there’s so much of this waste—thousands of tons of it!
S: How does that volume compare with coal-fired plants, the major competitor to nuclear power?
P:

A 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant, supplying all the electricity used by a million people, produces 8 million tons of carbon dioxide, which can contribute to global warming; 100 thousand tons of sulfur dioxide, which can cause acid rain; nitrogen oxides equivalent to 200,000 automobiles; benzpyrene and other carcinogens; and 250,000 tons of ash containing enough uranium to make several Abombs; and airborne particulates that could cause respiratory problems. This does not include the mountain tops pushed into valleys to get at Appalachian coal seams.

In contrast, a nuclear reactor producing the same amount of electricity produces two cubic meters of waste that can be sealed in containers and stored at the plant. They could store another 40 years’ worth.

S: What if we just keep storing nuclear waste the same way we have been doing?
P: Even anti-nuclear activists agree there’s no safety problem with civilian nuclear waste storage. The few sites shutting down would need the fuel casks sent elsewhere. Some other sites might need to increase their storage capacity, but that’s not difficult. Some states have laws limiting fuel storage, but we could change these laws.
S:

Is nuclear waste storage a multi-billion dollar task?

P:

Well, we are spending billions to build a new storage facility at Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste. But there are already many government or private sites that could store spent-fuel casks from nuclear power plants for a few decades.

K: But then what would we do?
P: Nuclear waste contains many valuable products.We will ultimately want to recover those, as well as the unspent fuel. If this source of energy were in the form of oil, we’d be ready to sacrifice a generation to protect it. As coal,we’d destroy pristine mountains to get it. Right now it’s cheaper to use uranium ore, but the nuclear waste products are there for the future.
S: Isn’t radiation dangerous?
P: Large amounts are poisonous, small amounts are beneficial. In fact, there are experiments demonstrating that reducing the natural radiation background causes organisms to get sick and die. And people who live where natural radiation is high live longer and have less cancer.
K: How can that be? Radiation damages cells, and that’s how cancers start.
S: Are cells in your body ever damaged by events other than radiation exposure?
P: Oh, yes. Normal metabolism damages hundreds of millions of cells for each one damaged by background radiation.
S: Is it the same kind of damage?
P: Not exactly. Radiation damage is harder to repair. But we know that metabolism still leaves several million more damaged cells than radiation does. High-dose radiation kills, not by damaging more cells, but by degrading the defense system.
S: Then how does low-dose radiation affect the body beneficially?
P: When it stimulates the defense system, it enhances repair and replacement, not only of the few radiation-damaged cells, but also the very much larger number of metabolically damaged cells.
S: One fact that complicates discussions of radiation is the inescapable presence of natural radioactivity. How do the current regulatory limits on these natural radioactivities compare?
P: To do this, I have to explain what the numbers mean. Radioactivity, measured in curies, shows how intense a radiation source is. The amount of radiation one gets depends on the strength of the source, its distance from the receiver, and whether any shielding is present. One curie is the amount of radioactivity possessed by one gram of pure radium (1/28 of an ounce).We usually encounter much less than one curie, so we measure lesser amounts in picocuries (millionths of a millionth of a curie). In one picocurie, only about 2 atoms per minute are decaying and giving off radiation. The radioactivity of a liquid is measured in picocuries per liter (a liter is a little more than a quart). The proposed US regulatory limit for the radium level in tap water, for example, is 5 picocuries/liter, and 300 picocuries/liter for radon in tap water. Nuclear plant discharge water is only about 10, in contrast. Whiskey (1,200 picocuries/liter), beer (1,300), milk (1,400), and salad oil (5,000) all have far greater radioactivity levels than one might expect. And the natural radioactivity levels of some health spa waters can be as high as 300,000!
S: So it appears we are protecting people against a truly non-existent hazard! How about terrorism? We read some really frightening possibilities. Plutonium, we’re told, is the deadliest poison known? Is this true?
P: No. You can hold it in your hands. Spoonful for spoonful, it is about as toxic as caffeine. When physicist Bernard Cohen was told that he and other scientists were not interesting interview subjects, he offered to eat on-camera as much plutonium as Ralph Nader would eat caffeine. But the interviewer said that would be cheap exhibitionism.
S: So where does plutonium get this reputation?
K: It is considerably more lethal if inhaled.
S: Then the scenario of putting plutonium into a public ventilator would create a real disaster?
P: No, plutonium is very heavy and is extremely hard to keep suspended in air. It wouldn’t work well. During all the decades we have been handling plutonium in tonnage lots there has never been a death from plutonium toxicity—even after dispersing some 5-7 tons of it into the air during 1,000 weapons tests.
S: What about terrorist airplanes? Can an airliner fly through several feet of steel-lined reinforced concrete to crash into a nuclear power plant?
P: No. The plane would likely either slide off the curved surface or crush like an eggshell outside. Any jet fuel would burn harmlessly outside. The size of the plane is relatively unimportant, since the plane structure collapses on itself, absorbing most of the impact energy, and only the engines pose a penetration potential. In 1988, an unmanned Phantom F-4 fighter plane was driven by rockets at 480 miles per hour into a simulated containment wall section. The body of the plane crushed against the outside, penetrating less than an inch. The engine shaft penetrated less than two inches.
K: But if terrorists got inside the plant with explosives, couldn’t they, as speculated in the papers, create a disaster like that burning reactor accident in Chernobyl in 1986,with tens of thousands of deaths?
S: What is the worst that could happen?
P: No credible sequence of events involving a US reactor could lead to tens of thousands of deaths. Chernobyl caused no deaths to the public, even without containment and without evacuation for the critical first days. A UN scientific inquiry into Chernobyl reported no other deaths than the 30 workers and firefighters in the plant. The 2,000 thyroid cancers reported were said to be 97.5 percent curable and probably due to intensive screening, since they do not correlate consistently with radiation dose. An American reactor meltdown would be at worst more like Three Mile Island, where there were no significant health or environmental effects whatsoever, even to plant workers.
K: But what if the containment structure that held the fission products were breached?
P: Studies after the Three Mile Island accident showed that nearly all of the harmful fission products dissolved in the water and condensed out on the inside containment surfaces. Even if containment had been severely breached, little radioactivity would have escaped. Few, if any, people would have been harmed. Tons of molten reactor fuel and structure sitting on the 5-inch-thick reactor vessel bottom did not even penetrate the 5/16 inch cladding. So much for the dreaded China Syndrome!
K: What if terrorists obtained a spent-fuel shipping cask?
P:

There is nothing one can do to a spent-fuel shipping cask that could lead to a significant public hazard. Despite frightening claims about the hazards of what fear-mongers call “Mobile Chernobyls,” spent-fuel casks pose no significant public hazard. They cannot “go critical” like a reactor or detonate like a bomb. None of the radioactivity is in liquid form. These are metal-clad, solid ceramic pellets. For more than 30 years, over 5,000 fuel assemblies already have been shipped. Despite a few serious traffic accidents, not a single radiation release has occurred. The fuel in these casks is always cooled for several years prior to shipment, so the shortlived activity and the decay heat production have died down.

The shipping casks themselves are virtually indestructible. To be certified for shipping, a cask must be able to withstand a 30-foot drop onto its edge, a 40-inch drop onto a puncture bar, a 1,475°F fire for 30 minutes, and immersion under 50 feet of water for 8 hours. Further crash tests have involved a tractor trailer carrying the cask hitting a concrete wall at 84 mph, a locomotive hitting the cask broadside at 80 mph, a crash at 80 mph followed by 125 minutes of a completely engulfing jet fuel fire, and a drop test from a helicopter so that the cask buried itself more than 4 feet in the hard-packed ground.

In addition, casks have been tested with high-tech anti-tank explosive charges. Only in this last case was the cask breached, but even then the result of scattering a few chunks of spent fuel on the ground could not create a serious public hazard. There is no mechanism to disperse the radioactivity in an ingestible or respirable form over a significant distance. At worst, only a very few people would get some radiation doses, which would not be lifethreatening.

K: But there’s still the “dirty bomb.” A terrorist wraps radioactive material around an ordinary explosive and supposedly spreads death and destruction.
S: Is this a real threat?
P: No. This idea has been field-tested. It is completely ineffective. The radioactive ceramic scatters only a short distance. It then is just a matter of picking up some chunks of solid material. Little air, water, or land contamination results. There are few, if any, casualties beyond the reach of the explosion. Many tons of shielding would be required to permit handling by deliverers. This is not a credible weapon.
S: Do we need to worry that terrorists could process or recycle the material in a spent-fuel cask into a nuclear device?
P: That problem is mostly theoretical. Spent reactor fuel is a very poor source of weapons. Every nation with nuclear weapons has found it more difficult to use reactor fuel than to make weapons-grade bomb material from scratch.
S: So are you saying we need not be careful in dealing with nuclear technologies?
P: No, of course not. We always need to be vigilant against those who might seek to abuse nuclear material, and there are stringent safeguards in place for transporting and storing spent fuel. We have taken extraordinary precautions and, consequently, no one has been killed or even seriously injured by American-type nuclear power plants or their waste products. But this has had the perverse effect of scaring people into thinking we must have an unimaginably dangerous beast, and if it ever got out the results would be catastrophic. That’s why it is good we talked about how the laws of nature and the physical properties of materials prevent any major public hazard in any credible circumstance we can think of.
K: Wait a minute! I’ve read many times about some guy, usually a kid, getting burned by some radiation source.What about that?
P: Radiation now has thousands of industrial and commercial uses, some of which used to be done by x-rays. Just as people are occasionally hurt by inexcusably careless use of x-rays, so one can steal a radiographic source, take it out of its shield and carry it in his pocket, or play unknowingly with radioactive powder and make a mess. But these injuries result from illicit use of industrial equipment and generally affect only the miscreants and sometimes their families or associates.While unfortunate, they are in the same category as accidents involving stolen tractors, police cars, or medicinal narcotics. We don’t condemn the legitimate use of such things. We just tighten up on training and security. Such incidents are no more frequent or more damaging with radiation devices than with many other types of equipment.
S: Perhaps we’ve covered enough for one session. I would gladly buy you each a beer, but I was born too early—or perhaps more relevantly, died too early—to be eligible to join your club. Perhaps we could put it on one of your tabs?
   

[photo of Theodore Rockwell]

Theodore Rockwell (CC ’67) is a founding officer of the engineering firm MPR Associates, Inc. and a founding director of Radiation, Science, and Health, Inc., an international public interest organization. He formerly served as technical director of the US Navy’s nuclear program and the world’s first commercial atomic power plant.

[back]Return to COSMOS 2002 Table of Contents
[back]Return to COSMOS Journals
[back]Return to COSMOS Home Page