nuclear-news

No such thing as ‘clean’ nuclear energy

John Hoffmann , Carbondale, Apr 12, 2025, https://www.aspendailynews.com/opinion/no-such-thing-as-clean-nuclear-energy/article_8aeb44a7-c226-488e-82e0-4a32ebfcb434.html

Clean nuclear power is an oxymoron. Every part of the process is potentially deadly. Mining uranium involves stockpiling mounds of radioactive dirt.

In the National Library of Medicine, the article, “Health Effects of Particulate Uranium Exposure,” begins with, “Uranium contamination has become a non-negligible global health problem,” which “can cause severe body damage once inhaled.” The dust billows over reservations and populations near mines.

Yellowcake is produced through milling and roasting. After an intense four-step process, it is then shipped to concentrating sites, where the uranium is packed into steel drums and hauled to processing plants to turn it into fuel.

Uranium, like other heavy metals, is toxic and should not be inhaled or ingested, even if mildly radioactive. My trip to Naturita, Colorado, near where it is mined, showed me how potent radioactive dust works to rust the bridges, spall concrete, and ruin folks’ teeth. 

The milling and roasting into orange oxide at Oak Ridge becomes uranium tetrachloride or S-50 liquid thermal diffusion in the St. Louis plant, then into plutonium piles in Beverly, Massachusetts, Bloomfield, New Jersey, or Ames, Iowa, where the metal is recast into rods in induction-heated furnaces.

Now it can be shipped to one of the 94 reactors in the United States, where it creates electron-saturated cooling water and spent U-285 rods. The highly contaminated water and nuclear rods that pile up over the years need to be kept from contaminating the environment for thousands of years. So it is encased in concrete and stainless steel, which is stacked on-site until it is hauled somewhere for long-term storage, and therein lies the problem.

There is no place to store it safely. Not the salt caverns of Whipp or the deepest subducting zones of the oceans.

Wherever they are stacked, they become a target for an enemy to drop a conventional bomb that will do maximum damage to the downwind population. Yet Chernobyl demonstrated that every place on earth is downwind, because the atmosphere homogenizes pollutants within three days. Let’s rethink calling nuclear “clean” energy.

April 15, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health