Nuclear Power Is Not Safe
 https://cleantechnica.com/2019/05/13/nuclear-power-is-not-safe/ May 13th, 2019 by George Harvey Should we subsidize uncompetitive old nuclear plants? Should we build (uncompetitive) new ones?
One nuclear industry safety assessment figure claims risks are only one-tenth as great as the historic record shows they are. If the people in the industry know it, they are not admitting to a serious safety problem. If they don’t know it, they are simply ignorant of their industry’s record. Either way, I think it is clear that nuclear industry safety analyses should be regarded as untrustworthy.
To deal with the nuclear power industry, we have to understand that some numbers it produces are nearly always accurate, and some are nearly never so. The accurate numbers include the power rating of a plant, the amount of energy produced by the fission of an atom of a given isotope, the approximate percentages of specific isotopes among products of fission, and the amount of time it takes to refuel a plant, if everything goes normally. There are other numbers that seem usually to be off by a factor of two. When the industry supplies the cost to build a new reactor and the amount of time it will take it, it is probably best to take those figures and double them. If a plant is projected to cost $6 billion and take six years to build, experience tells us that a safer estimate would be $12 billion and twelve years. The really big problem, however, comes with statements about safety.
Whenever I think about this question, I recall an email I got from a nuclear power advocate, in which he appeared to gloat about how safe the industry is. Compared with the deaths associated with coal, he claimed, nuclear power produced almost none. He “proved” this by citing the explosion at Chernobyl, which he said killed 31 people. He compared this with the hundreds of thousands killed by the coal industry each year.
Most pro-nuclear advocates admit that in addition to those 31, who were mostly killed by concussion or flying debris, at least several dozen people died of radiation poisoning from the Chernobyl accident. One source at the United Nations put the number of additional cancer-related deaths in 2008 at 64 and rising. This is a far cry from the estimate in the Chernobyl Forum, also from the UN, which is that something like 4,000 early deaths could ultimately result. Greenpeace puts the number at many times that. Radical anti-nuclear activists and some European governments put the number at well over 100,000 and possibly as high as 200,000. While the numbers related to safety, they seem to be matters of opinion, rather than fact. The high numbers are well over a thousand times as great as the low numbers. (Wikipedia: Chernobyl Disaster: Deaths Due to Radiation) Fortunately, safety can be assessed from other points of view, with specific, comparable safety-related numbers, and at least one of these is pretty much indisputable. Based on them, we can learn something about the accuracy of the nuclear industry’s other safety statements in general. I will focus on one number, which relates to the likelihood that a nuclear plant will suffer a “core damage event.” (Note that “core damage event” (CDE) is the term used for what people call “meltdown.” It includes events involving melted or deformed fuel, ranging from “partial meltdowns” to Chernobyl-scale events or worse, regardless of the amount of damage.) Early on, when our oldest reactors were new, probabilistic risk assessments for nuclear plants indicated that a core damage frequency of one event in 10,000 reactor years could be expected. This means that in any given year, any given reactor has a one in 10,000 chance of melting down. More recently, that number was increased to one event in 20,000 reactor years, because newer reactors are thought to be safer. With some newer reactors, the numbers are said to be more like one event in 50,000 reactor years, and, in the case of the proposed small modular reactors, the claim is that some reactors cannot melt down at all. he World Nuclear Association, in an article updated in February of 2019, says civil nuclear plants have run through approximately 17,000 reactor years, worldwide. According to the earliest risk analysis, which was valid for only the earliest reactors, that could have been expected to produce 1.7 CDEs. With most reactors having been built with designs that had much reduced risk of one in 20,000 years or more, we really should have expected one CDE, or possibly none. There is another way to look at these figures. If the core damage frequency is one in 10,000, that means that for a reactor with a 40-year life span, the likelihood of the reactor melting down during its lifetime is forty in 10,000, one in 250, or 0.4%. If the reactor is designed to a core damage frequency of one in 20,000, then the likelihood of meltdown over its lifetime is one in 500, or 0.2%. These numbers do not reflect what has happened in the real world. Having gone through 17,000 reactor years at civil reactors, we have experienced three meltdowns in Japan, all at Fukushima Daiichi; at least one meltdown in the Soviet Union, at Chernobyl (though given the Soviet inclination to cover things up, there might have been others); one in Scotland, at Chapelcross; two in France, both at Saint-Laurent, but on different occasions; one in Czechoslovakia, at Jaslovské Bohunice; and three meltdowns in the United States, one each at Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), Fermi (Michigan), and SRE (California). In other words, instead of the projected number of CDEs, which we might have expected to be one or fewer, there were at least eleven in the real world. Instead of having a frequency of one in 20,000 reactor years, or more, or even of one in 10,000 for the oldest plants in the world, the number was about one in 1,550. And we can calculate that the likelihood of a CDE in the lifetime of a given plant is certainly not 0.2% or even 0.4%. In the real world, it has proven to be about 2% for the time the reactors have served, which is, on average, about three-quarters of their service lives. To calculate for the full service life, divide that figure by three-quarters, and you get 2.66%. So based on experience, the likelihood that any randomly chosen nuclear plant will have melted down when its time is up is 2.66%, or one in about 37.6. If you went before a group of citizens and told them, “The reactor we want to build here is really safe, there is only a one-in-forty chance that it will ever melt down,” how do you think you would be received? This miscalculation can be attributed to a specific problem in the math used in risk analysis, and in my opinion it is serous enough to reduce its value of the risk analysis for nuclear plants to zero. In every case of a CDE, the event was beyond the design basis, meaning that there was no way to include it properly in the calculations. The causes of the events were not assessed properly in the calculations because they are unpredictable. The Three Mile Island meltdown happened because of human error. The Chernobyl disaster happened because of human error. How do you predict human error? Actually, I believe all of the others depended on human error, as well. For example, I will claim that the Fukushima Disaster was due to human error. It was certainly beyond design basis, but in this case the industry seems to have exclaimed, “How could anyone have known?” Their excuse was that the event was unprecedented, that a tsunami of the magnitude that ruined the plant was unpredictable, arising from a record-breaking earthquake, also unpredictable. But was it unpredictable? The Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 caused a 5.7 meter (18.7 feet) seawall at Fukushima to be overwhelmed by a tsunami whose waves were locally 14.5 meters (47.5 feet). While that is impressive, I would argue that it was not unpredictable. Along the coast in 2011, the highest wave was 40.5 meters (133 feet), enough to submerge a 10-story building easily. But on the same northeast coast of Japan, the Sanriku Earthquake of 1933 produced a tsunami with a maximum wave of 28.7 meters, and the Sanriku Earthquake of 1896 produced a tsunami of 38.2 meters. When I think of these data, my mind goes to a meeting I can imagine between design engineers for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant and their management. Someone asks how tall the seawall needs to be, and someone else answers with the question, “How tall can you make it within the budget?” Such is my imagination. I think the sea walls should have been at least six or eight meters higher, the Fukushima Disaster can be attributed to bad planning (possibly due to greed), and that can be correctly called “human error.” The point is that the nuclear industry safety problems in question, serious safety problems that caused CDEs, developed more than an order of magnitude more often than they were expected. The simple reason is that certain problems are not correctly calculated in probabilistic risk assessments. These problems, of which human error is one, are not correctly calculated for a simple reason: they are impossible to predict, and so their probability cannot be used accurately in a calculation. It seems clear that the greatest cause of the most destructive nuclear accidents is human error. The risk should not have been stated in the form of “one in 20,000.” It should have been stated as “one in 20,000, unless someone does something stupid.” Question: What is the chance of someone doing something stupid? Answer: Approximately 100%; given the current US administration, it is precisely 100%. The relevant question here is not whether a stupid thing will happen, because it will, but whether it will cause a meltdown. Whatever the cause of failure is, the nuclear industry has to face the fact that until it addresses the failure of its risk analysis, its safety calculations are utterly without value. |
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Women poorly represented in, and disparaged by, the nuclear security “priesthood”
The Nuclear Weapons Sisterhood, It’s hard for women to be hired, promoted or taken seriously in the national security establishment. NYT, By Carol Giacomo, Ms. Giacomo is a member of the editorial board, May 15, 2019 In the mid-1990s, Laura Holgate, then a senior Defense Department official, was in Moscow leading a delegation to discuss ways the United States could help the Russians secure plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.
image – New York Times
After a male Russian official gave a confusing explanation about the Kremlin’s storage plans, she sought clarification. The Russian, his voice dripping with sarcasm, offered to “put this in terms a woman would understand” and then described loading plutonium into a “cooking pot and putting a lid on it.”
……. For women, people of color and transgender people, sexism, discrimination and harassment are often barriers to being hired, promoted or taken seriously in the national security bureaucracy — overseas and at home.
…….Women are particularly underrepresented in senior positions dealing with nuclear issues, according to a study by New America, part of a growing effort involving various groups and individuals to make the fields more welcoming to women.
Part of the problem is the discipline itself, the study found. Policies involving the building, deployment, targeting and use of nuclear weapons have long been the province of an insular, innovation-averse group of men. Discussions by this “priesthood” conflate national security and manliness with sexualized jargon about vertical erector launchers and thrust-to-weight ratios. The demand for nuclear orthodoxy has excluded outsiders, particularly women, placing them in a “consensual straitjacket” of conformity in a male-dominated world.
Just consider Donald Regan, the former White House chief of staff, who before President Ronald Reagan’s summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 said women were “not going to understand throw-weights” or other national security issues raised at the meeting.
The numbers show how this order became so entrenched. From the 1970s to 2019, the study found, women held 11 of 68 of senior positions dealing with nuclear weapons, arms control and nonproliferation at the State Department, 13 of 109 of these jobs at the now-defunct Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, five of 63 at the Defense Department, five of 36 at the Energy Department and two of 21 national security adviser positions. ……
To be successful in these posts so critical to national security, women pay a “gender tax,” performing “the constant mental and emotional calculus that comes with implicit sexism; explicit sexism and discrimination; gender and sexual harassment; and gendered expectations,” according to the New America study, based on interviews with 23 women who held senior government positions.
Nearly all of the 23 said they were harassed or saw others harassed, and when a foreign official was involved, the stress was magnified because it could cause an international incident.
During a round-table discussion with Global Politico in 2017, Laura Rosenberger, who spent 11 years at the State Department and the National Security Council, talked about wearing more pantsuits and baggier tops as a defense mechanism “to make myself seem less attractive in the workplace.”
Mieke Eoyang, who served 12 years as a staff member on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, has described how she would walk into a meeting and be asked to get coffee or how a committee chairman cornered her at a reception to discuss his sexual prowess. ….
To encourage progress, Pamela Hamamoto, who served as United States ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, began a program called Gender Champions to identify international leaders committed to advancing women, and Ms. Holgate, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, replicated it in the United States. …..https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/opinion/women-national-security.html
Iran officially ends some of its nuclear deal commitments, local media reports
Distress in Pacific Island governments, over climate change, and Australia’s inaction on this
UN secretary-general meets Pacific leaders to discuss ‘global catastrophe’ of climate change ABC By foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic , 15 May 19
- UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the Pacific is on the “front line of climate change”
- Pacific leaders have voiced frustration over Australia’s failure to curb its emissions
- Australian politicians say rapidly cutting emissions would be “ruinous” for Australia
Regional heavyweights had gathered at an historic climate change summit convened with the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres.
Mr Guterres is intent on building global momentum for sharper cuts to emissions, arguing that drastic action is necessary to stave off ecological disaster.
The Pacific is on the “front line of climate change”, Mr Guterres told the meeting.
“It has a unique moral authority to speak out. It’s time for the world to listen.”
Senior Australian officials at the meeting could do little else; sent in the place of Prime Minister Scott Morrison only days before the federal election, they were bound to observer status by the caretaker conventions.
As a result, Australia did not sign up to the final statement by Pacific leaders, which declared climate change a “global catastrophe” and called for “transformative action” to stop it……
while Pacific leaders have praised New Zealand’s announcement that it wants to go carbon neutral by 2050, many are frustrated that Australia has failed to curb its emissions.
One Pacific official told the ABC the meeting’s call for radical action on climate change “really was aimed at the whole globe” but “for those in the room [it] was a message for one country”.
“Of course no-one said Australia. No-one needed to say Australia,” the official said. “What other country in the room could we be referring to?”
The outspoken Prime Minister of Samoa, Tuilaepa Sailele, went much further, wading straight into Australia’s election campaign during the post-summit press conference…….
decision makers in Canberra also know that the Pacific is increasingly impatient about Australia’s long and painful debate on climate policy.
The argument will flare up again in only months when regional leaders gather for the Pacific Islands Forum on tiny Tuvalu, which has long been a vocal champion for drastic climate action.
And this time, Australia will not be sitting on the sidelines. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-16/guterres-antonio-un-pacific-meeting-climate-change/11115816
Nuclear lobby pushing for tax-payer funds, pretending that nuclear power is “clean”
 Scientists meeting in France seek more funds for nuclear energy https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/energy/scientists-meeting-in-france-seek-more-funds-for-nuclear-energy-64552 15 May 19,
They claim nuclear energy, being clean, [ ??] would help mitigate climate change A number of scientists and other professionals who assembled at an international summit in France on May 13, 2019, have pushed for nuclear energy, arguing it would help mitigate climate change.The scientists had gathered at the International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP) in Juan-les-Pins, France, to sign a declaration. There were forty nuclear associations who demanded public investment in the nuclear sector as it has experienced almost stagnant public investment since 2000 and private players too have shown little interest. “The current level of public support for nuclear research and development (R&D) has remained constant at around $4 billion per year since 2000, in a business-as-usual situation,” a statement issued by those assembled noted. The scientists gave several reasons for the lack of enthusiasm among the private sector. These included mixed or negative political signals as well as electricity market designs that have had a negative impact on the business case for nuclear energy. They underlined new reactor technologies like small modular reactors, Gen IV reactors and new applications . ike desalination, district heating, process heat for industry and hydrogen production and emphasised on the need of resources for research and development. The meet also raised the issue of R&D infrastructure, which has become obsolete and needs to be renewed. The statement demanded doubling of public investment in nuclear-related R&D and innovation within the next five years, with a focus on innovative applications of advanced nuclear systems to enable the clean energy mix of the future. The meet on May 13 comes just days before the tenth Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) Conference scheduled on May 28 and 29 in Canada. The CEM consists of the 28-member European Union (EU) as well as 24 other countries. It accounts for 90 per cent of all investment in clean energy globally and is also responsible for around 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The ICAPP meet demanded that the CEM Conference should takes nuclear innovation to broad, multilateral discussions on clean energy at both, the ministerial and working levels. The statement says that it will help nuclear energy and in return, the sector will help in decarbonisation goals. It should be noted that after the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan, many countries decided to phase out nuclear energy. |
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Chinese public’s trust in government means that nuclear power better able to go ahead in China
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China and the Nuclear Debate, China’s nuclear energy sector is expanding amid the glow of positive public opinion. The Diplomat, By Layne Vandenberg, May 15, 2019 “……… The Diplomat sat down with Tobi Du, a Yenching Scholar at the Yenching Academy at Peking University to discuss nuclear issues in East Asia, how Chinese view nuclear threats, and the development of nuclear energy…….. Although China is one of the five official nuclear weapons states as designated by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, China has historically supported North Korea. While China does facilitate denuclearization talks, it definitely does not feel threatened in the same way that the U.S. and Japan do considering North Korea has explicitly stated that its nuclear weapons program is intended to deter the U.S. and its allies. Because of this, people in China are not currently as sensitive to nuclear threats as they are in other countries. …… Despite the lack of public support for development of the nuclear energy industry in most other countries, research shows that the Chinese public is not strongly against nuclear power. …… [following the Fukushima nuclear accident] despite a negative outlook for nuclear energy globally, China is unique in that the public did not become as opposed to the development of nuclear energy. Trust in the government has a lot to do with this. Since Chinese citizens generally possess a low level of knowledge about nuclear energy and related issues, the public places a significant amount of trust in the government to conduct its own assessments and accepts the results. Generally, the Fukushima nuclear accident did not affect the direction of Chinese policy for nuclear energy but prompted a more careful and measured attitude towards implementation. Considering China’s unique ability to interact with and shape public discourse around sensitive topics, public input in decision-making is minimal because of this control. The central government is able to implement the nuclear energy industry in China as it sees fit. In contrast to China’s more receptive public opinion, most countries are keenly cognizant of issues related to nuclear weapons, and mostly focus on these issues and their accompanying negative connotations. ….. So while it is true that Chinese people generally have a more positive opinion of nuclear energy in China than in other countries after Fukushima, it is China’s political governance that allows the country to push forward with nuclear power.…….. https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/china-and-the-nuclear-debate/ |
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